The Director of Phoenix Delivers Another Emotional Knock-Out With Transit

In many ways, Transit reminded me less of director Christian Petzold's previous film Phoenix and more of texts I read in my Literature Under Dictatorship class this past Fall. Centered around books like Ivan Angelo's The Celebration written about experiences living under South American dictatorships, these texts frequently featured extended gazes into the psyche of the author (Angelo goes on long diatribes about the perceived pointlessness of his own writing, for example) as well as telling numerous individual smaller stories rather than just focusing exclusively on a singular protagonist. This way, the reader can get an accurate view of how a dictatorship impacts people on a widespread level.


The fact that Transit is a story about political refugees trying to evade capture from controlling government auhtorities (in this case, Paris, France police officers) is enough to make it clear why the film evoked the Literature Under Dictatorship texts I'd recently consumed. However, choosing to tell this story through a narrator who has an unknown connection to the lead characters specifically echoed one of the essential ideas running through those crucial pieces of literature, especially the aforementioned Ivan Angelo tome The Celebration. Specifically, Transit's narration captures the idea that Transit's story and the systemic oppression influencing it extends far beyond its own lead character, Georg (Franz Rogowski). The impact of these elements even extends to unseen figures who narrate these stories so that future generations can (hopefully) do better.

Such a story concerns Georg trying every way he can to escape modern-day Paris, France. Through the tragic demise of a colleague, Georg has managed to procure papers that ensure he can get safe passage to Mexico. Actually getting all the pieces in place so that he can actually leave the city, though, that's a whole other matter, one that leads him to interact with other people also trying to survive the horrors of brutal police authorities. Among the individuals he encounters are a woman with two dogs, a young boy that sees Georg as a kind of father figure he's been missing for so long and a woman named Marie (Paula Beer) whose married to a doctor.

Interestingly, Christian Petzold's script smartly makes sure these characters that Georg encounters aren't people whose sole reason for existence is to serve for him, they're not around to hand him tidy life lessons or to fulfill emptiness within himself. On the contrary, a critical part of the characters in Transit (and another element that evokes the expansive nature of those Literature Under Dictatorship books) is how they're basically going through their own movies that Georg briefly intersects with. This is especially true of Marie, who, in the middle of an onslaught of turmoil, finds hope in clinging to her long-standing belief that her missing husband is still alive out there.

Through fleshing out the players of Transit in this manner, Christian Petzold renders figures dehumanized by French society (and most societies at that) as fleshed-out human beings, ones capable of acts of good (like Georg connecting with that young boy) and bad (like a haunting scene showing all the refugees turning a blind eye to a refugee being violently arrested) like any human being. A sense of discernable humanity is found in the writing of Transit, as is a brutally harrowing quality that makes it clear that everybody in this story, even the ones putting on an external facade of everything being fine, is dancing on the razor's edge between life and death every single day.

Everything in the world of Georg and the other refugees he encounters is temporary. Homes, friends, possessions, none of them are permanent and Petzold realizes this impermanent quality with chilling effectiveness. That's a feature of Transit reflected with equal levels of success by the cast, especially Paula Beer who poignantly portrays a woman who must cling to the past lest she be forced to confront a present devoid of anything she loves. Beer portrays this character's conviction in such a quietly gut-wrenching manner that it lends such visceral humanity to a member of the marginalized. That's yet another, yet perhaps the most important, similarity Transit shares with the excellent Literature Under Dictatorship texts I read in recent months. Specifically, they share the trait of carrying a dedication to using art to render folks being erased by government forces as the human beings they actually are.

(P.S. Major props for actually pulling off such a bold unexpected needle drop for the end credits, the opening acoustic chant of that song especially works, both in terms of the vocals and the actual lyrics, as a haunting capper to the proceedings film)