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

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Mubi Monday: Phoenix (2014)

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A woman (Nelly, played by Nina Hoss) survives the Holocaust, seriously disfigured, and doctors try to reconstruct her face, which has been seriously damaged. She ends up looking similar to her old self, but not exactly the same. Seeking out her husband (Johnny, played by Ronald Zehrfeld), despite warnings that he may have been the one to betray her to the Nazis, she becomes embroiled in a plan that requires her to pretend to be his "dead wife" in order to collect her sizeable inheritance and turn a very bad situation into a good, profitable, one. Can she keep up the charade, and will she find out, once and for all, whether or not Johnny really did betray her?

Adapted from a novel, The Return From The Ashes, by Hubert Monteilhet, this is a film that feels very much in the middle of harsh reality and dark fairytale. It's the royalty returning in disguise to take over the kingdom, on the one hand, but it's also very much showing someone painfully trying to put back together the shattered windows of their soul. Someone who assumed they were going to die, and then somehow survived, and everything beyond that point is both a blessing and a confounding mess. Because how do you move forward from your death?

Hoss is superb in the role of Nelly, a woman trying to remain composed on the surface as she is both attracted and repulsed by the idea of reclaiming her former life. Zehrfeld plays his character in a way that is suitably ambiguous, considering the circumstances, allowing for tension to build as we head towards a climax that may yet reveal some painful truths. And, an important third party in the plot, Nina Kunzendorf is very good as Lene Winter, the woman who helps her friend head home after her ordeal, and who tries to warn her against her plan.

Although it may seem like a ridiculously contrived, over the top, melodrama, Phoenix is a gripping film, one that manages to make a big impact without resorting to scenes of major histrionics or war movie stereotypes. Director Christian Petzold, who worked with Harun Farocki in adapting the story to the screen, does a remarkable job, showing restraint throughout and allowing the strength of the lead performances to carry the viewers along, providing a lot of food for thought while never bringing things to a halt in order to hammer home any one particular point. Double-bill this with Son Of Saul and you have quite the devastating display of the impact of the Holocaust on individuals, and how that machinery of genocide would grind down the humanity in those who were somehow surviving, one day at a time.

I'm very surprised that there hasn't been some remake of this already. Perhaps it's viewed as something too unbelievable, even for Hollywood, but truth can be stranger than fiction, as we all know, and this does more than enough to make everything seem entirely believable, from the harrowing first scenes all the way to an emotionally-charged and brilliant final moment.

8/10

You can buy the movie here.