Mubi Monday: Transit (2018)

Well, this had been recommended to me some time ago (by a friend who I resent sometimes for how much bloody impeccable taste she seems to have) and I am glad to finally mark it off my watchlist. I'm also glad that, as expected, this was as good as expected. Writer-director Christian Petzold is now 4 for 4, from his films that I have seen, and it's hard to pick an outright favourite from his more recent releases, each one just oozing quality in pretty much every department.

The core of the story here is quite simple. Franz Rogowski plays Georg, a German political refugee who is travelling from Paris to Marseille, from where he hopes to gain safe passage to Mexico. This is complicated by two main events. First, Georg has the ID and last manuscript of a writer named Franz Weidel. Second, his injured friend dies en route. Because he is using the details of Weidel, this puts Georg on a collision course with the writer's wife, Marie (Paula Beer), who doesn't realise that her husband has passed away. Can everyone work together to get to safety, or will the fragile balance be upset by revelations and complicated relations?

Based on a novel by Anna Seghers, previously adapted into a movie back in 1991, Transit is another Petzold film that nails some very specific ideas and feelings, while also presenting characters dealing with extraordinary circumstances in ways that anyone can identify with. Petzold is a master at ensuring viewers know what world his main characters are living in, sketching things out in the opening scenes to start building drama and tension right away, and he also works with a damn fine selection of actors that rise to meet the demands of the material.

Rogowski and Beer are the beating heart of the film, even if they don't actually spend any meaningful time together onscreen until the third act. It's their intersecting lives that drive the narrative, as one thinks she is always just missing her husband and the other starts to be drawn to this woman he both wants to seek out and also keep at bay. Godehard Giese is also very good, a doctor who is inadvertently caught up in the whole mess, and Lilien Batman and Maryam Zaree are excellent as a child and mother befriended by Georg, other human connections that may make things complicated as he continues to plan his journey to Mexico.

Tweak this in a number of different ways and you could have a number of different types of movies here. The easiest option would me to make this a straightforward "spy thriller", but you could make an action movie from it, there's potential for it to be turned into a black comedy, something Kafka-esque that wrings humour from spiralling nightmare scenarios, and there are some other directions it could take, but Petzold knows exactly what he's doing as he handles the whole thing with care, ensuring it goes the way he wants it to go, while allowing viewers the chance to consider moments that hint at other possibilities. Not better possibilities, just other ones.

It's also worth noting that the final scene is enough to bump it up a whole point.

9/10

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