Product Description When a man flees France after a fascist invasion, he assumes the identity of a dead author whose papers he possesses. Stuck in Marseilles, he meets a young woman desperate to find her missing husband - the very man he's impersonating. Review Franz Rogowski stars as Georg, a German in Paris during an increasingly tense and violent occupation. Seghers book was released in 1944 and set in 1942, so the story at that time was about the Nazis, but Petzold boldly chooses to update the story to modern times without really clarifying the threat. We just know that people are being rounded up and the country is increasingly unsafe. Before we ve even seen the title card, police sirens have been heard three times. There s a sense of dread and urgency that s amplified by leaving the threat as undefined as active police cars in the street and enhanced discussion of things like travel papers. Especially with our current state of the world and its threats of violence amidst increased polarization, the themes of Transit have added resonance by making this a 10s story instead of a 40s one. In Paris, Georg is asked to take two pieces of correspondence to a writer named Weidel. When Georg gets to the hotel, he finds a bathroom covered in the blood of the man he was supposed to meet, who has committed suicide. He takes the writer's belongings and jumps a train with a man named Heinz who has been injured. The two are headed to Marseilles to hop a boat to Mexico, where they might be safe, but Heinz dies on the journey. Two dead men will shape Georg s future, guiding him into the lives they left behind. - Brian Tallerico (4/4 Stars) --https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transit-2019The past and present are a terrifying blur in Transit, a brilliant allegory set in France that opens amid wailing police sirens. The solitary man in a cafe sipping espresso doesn t flinch. He is soon joined by a second man who gives him a name: Georg. Why are you still here, the second man asks, Paris is being sealed off. In urgent tones, they discuss visas, danger, money. Georg agrees to deliver two letters and then steps into streets filled with jackboots and terror, a world in which time seems to have folded in on itself. An existential thriller about loss, trauma, statelessness and historical amnesia, Transit is the latest from the German director Christian Petzold, an electrifying, original filmmaker. Petzold is likely best known in the United States for Barbara, a slow-burning drama about an East German doctor who, after a failed attempt to go to the West, decides to stay. In Barbara, to voluntarily remain in a totalitarian dictatorship is an ethical choice, a form of resistance. There are no valorous choices in Transit, where leaving is a high-stakes necessity for Georg and the desperate, panicked refugees around him. To stay is to die. - Manohla Dargis --https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); About the Actor Franz Rogowski was born in 1986 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. The actor is best known for the internationally successful film Victoria (2015). The German thriller is one of the few feature films shot in a single continuous take and won amongst other things the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Cinematography as well as the German Film Award in six categories. Since 2015 Franz Rogowski is a member of the Munich Kammerspiele. In 2017, Rogowski appeared in the French film Happy End directed by Michael Haneke. About the Director Christian Petzold was born in Hilden in 1960. After studying German and Drama at the Freie Universität Berlin, he enrolled in Berlin's German Academy for Film and Television (DFFB). There he studied film direction, while at same time working as an assistant director to Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. After graduation, Christian Petzold made several interesting TV films. In 2000, his first theatrical feature, The State I Am In (2000), about a couple of left-wing terrorists, is released and makes a strong impression and earning its director both the German Film Award and the Hessischer Best Film Award. By 2012, this prolific creator has managed to make two more TV films and five additional features, among which Yella (2007), the sensitive portrait of a young woman who tries to escape the grip of her violent and possessive husband, and especially Barbara (2012), which won the 'Best Director' award at the Berlinale. This fine drama plunges the viewer into the everyday life atmosphere of the GDR like few films before and serves as a showcase for its director's talents. See more
M**S
Absorbing, initially puzzling, thriller
Here we have a German (dissident?) fleeing the Germans (?) who are invading WW2 (?) France - but it's happening now with 2019 cars and modern police uniforms and weapons etc. Keeps you guessing till you realise the themes of oppression, appeasement, looking the other way, denial and so on are timeless - and happening at this moment all over the repressed part of the world (and that's most of it) if not in Britain.Plot twists till the very end. Highly recommended.
T**Y
Betwixt and between
Christian Petzold the German director has come to inhabit the space left by Haneke, Von Donnersmarck, Antonioni in film, and Kafka, Koestler ,Camus and Faulkner in literature, in the making of his series of films, Yella, Phoenix, Barbara and now Transit. Transit is based on the novel by Anna Seghers about her experiences of escaping from a Nazi-occupied Europe via Marseilles. Petzold talks about emigration, together with immigration, the ghosts of the past inhabiting the fugitive lives of refugees in the present; the menace of fascism occupying both past and present. As Faulkner said, “the past is not dead, it’s not even past.” Is man in exile, where is our homeland? The nodal point of the present ‘present’ in the film is Marseilles, that multicultural city, on the northern Mediterranean shores, looking out to Africa. Today too man is in exile from normality due to a modern pandemic; vast numbers of immigrants are crossing Europe, fleeing from wars, famine in a search for human rights and a better life. Like all the best directors, he has been blessed by using good actors like Nina Hoss, with her elusive beauty, and in Transit, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer. Rogoski as Georg brings charismatic intensity, warmth; Paula Beer is the mystery beauty who’s writer –husband has committed suicide (unbeknownst to her). Petzold takes the past and sees what happens when he transposes it into the present( the past infects us still). Everything in Marseilles is in transition but is scorched by a bright pitiless sun without shadow. Petzold has said he doesn’t like the museum of costume drama, so the Germans are invisible. Here, now we get a kind of momentary freedom as people with stories to tell sort out their visas, driven by fear and the urgency of boarding the next available boat. We inhabit a liminal space, where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown, a waiting room of hell. In limbo everything unfolds for refugees, where they develop and tell their own story. We exist in a state of consciousness where past and present are interchangeable.Georg assumes the identity of the dead writer he had to hand 2 letters to, one from Weidel’s wife, one from the Mexican Consul. In Paris, ‘aliens’ duck and dive to avoid ‘spring cleaning.’ He assists an injured friend Heinz to get to Marseilles to his wife and child, but he has to give them bad news. There, enigmatic Marie keeps bumping into him thinking he is her husband. He falls in love with her, but dares not tell her that husband Weidel is dead. Georg appropriates Weidel’s identity, quoting one of Kafka’s stories as if he wrote it himself* .He gains 2 visas, ships passage and a money order. The film should be seen as a fiction written by the writer-director to be read: by reading, it turns human experience into a kind of object that you can look at and turn over. Possibility jostles with futility and abandon, profit with loss, love with despair. The voice-over narrator enters the story in Marseilles. Georg finds when he goes for a room he can only stay in the hotel if he can prove he is not going to stay. He is all but invisible to the local populace. He strikes up a relationship with dead Heinz’s son and mute wife, Melissa and Driss, feeling an obligation to their plight. He creates a substitute family, fixing their radio, playing football with Driss, taking him to the fair. They are illegals from Maghreb. Then finds a doctor to help Driss recover from his asthma . The doctor lives with Marie, who is still waiting on her ex to supply a visa. They all have a narrow window before the Nazis ‘cleansing’. Georg gets caught up with Marie’s and the doctor’s fates. Everybody is on a road to nowhere (music at end) : we inhabit a land of death, shades and stasis. Meticulously told like a short story. Loved the film, but wonder if the voice-over narration depletes its dynamic, showing not telling. Also, can we compare immigrants to Europe (today) with emigrants from Europe? Great themes.* "You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don't you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn't bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: 'What do you think you're waiting for? You've been in Hell for a long time already.'
S**G
yet another recent film that fails to make any impact
The idea of telling a story written about WW2 (based on a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers) in an undefined present tense is probably a good one, as it allows us to think of parallels in the modern world. The themes are being a refugee, trying to get somewhere safe, people unable to cope with the pressure, and the complexities of being caught in bureaucracies that may or may not allow you to leave. Georg, the main character, is stuck in Marseille, having assumed the identity of a dead writer whose papers he has been entrusted with. He later meets this man's estranged wife, by an unlikely coincidence, and befriends a young North African boy whose mother is deaf and dumb. Somehow the effect of the film is not really to take you into anything, not even the baking Marseille sun. There is so little sense of the specificity of this place. This is compounded by all the rooms having the same ochre/buff-coloured walls, no matter what building they are in! It seems very much to be about joining up the dots, of which there are many, but every scene just feels light, like something acted. It isn't helped by a voiceover that is far too present, and rather artificial. The device reduces what we see to a sort of illustration of what we are told, confirming its roots in a novel, but failing to come to life on the screen. It's partly that too much happens, but more than that, it fails to engage with the substance of the story, or to convey the feeling of real life.
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1 week ago
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