Butler's Cinema Scene

Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski

“TRANSIT” My rating: C+

101 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Transit” is a great idea that runs itself into the ground.

The opening moments of Christian Petzold’s film (he adapted it from Anna Seghers’ novel) take place in Paris under the German occupation.

Except that the setting isn’t the 1940s…it’s today.

The cars, the clothing, even the flat-screen TVs scream 21st century. But things are missing. Like computers and cel phones.

Our hero, Georg (Franz Rogowski), is part of an underground movement and desperate to get out of the country.  The police are making sweeps of blocks, sending undesirables off to hastily-erected camps.

The film never really lays out its geopolitical roots. Is this a new fascist movement that has swept the country? Was there a physical invasion of France? Is the year 2018 or are we supposed to imagine that somehow it’s still the ’40s?  (Hitler is never mentioned, nor is National Socialism. No German helmets or swastikas.)

Anyway, Georg manages to hide in a boxcar on a train heading to Marseilles. Once in the port city he joins the ranks of thousands of others lining up at the U.S. and Mexican consulates hoping to get transit papers that will allow them to board a ship for freedom (apparently there are no airlines in this alternative reality).

Georg is better off than most. He’s managed to assume the identity of a semi-famous writer, Weisel,  who has committed suicide; his newly-assumed standing as a man of letters moves him to the front of the immigration line.

Franz Rogowski

Even so this is a waiting game.

Georg/Weisel befriends a young boy (Lilien Batman) and his deaf mother (Maryam Zaree).  He also falls in with a selfless refugee doctor, Richard (Godehard Giese), who is sharing a hotel room with the ethereal Marie (Paula Beer).  Incredibly enough, Marie is the estranged wife of the dead Weisel, the man whose identity and papers Georg has assumed.

It doesn’t take long to realize that “Transit” is basically a heavy-handed re-do of “Casablanca.”  But while that Bogart/Bergman classic was endlessly entertaining with its witty dialogue, colorful characters and insouciant attitude, Petzold’s film is a slog.

Georg, Richard, Marie and their fellow refugees are caught up in an existential dilemma, spending countless hours in slow-moving queues, enduring interrogation by less-than-sympathetic government bureaucrats.

All they can do is talk…and, boy, do they ever talk.  Think endless angst-riddled conversations.

The film also relies on a maddening voiceover narration that commits the unpardonable sin of describing to us what we can see with our own eyes.

Things are doubly damned by leading man Rogowski’s flat performance. His Georg is so utterly charmless that you can’t believe for a minute that Marie is falling for him.

| Robert W. Butler