Transit

In adapting German author Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel, Christian Pertzold strips out all specific references to Naziism. The French setting is explicit but the time setting is left open. The clothing and buildings are contemporary but without our cell phones this could be anytime, anywhere. The “cleansing” of “illegals” here is fascism attacking humanity. It could be in Marseilles in 1942 — or Washington in 2022.

Against a backdrop of government raids, public murders, terrifying sirens, a citizenry bent upon or suspected of serial betrayals, honour consigned to whispers and the shadows, the narrative unfurls as a series of touching, intense personal relationships. For a suppressed and doomed society, there is a lot of love here. 

Despite being warned that his friend is “dragging you down,” Georg tries to smuggle out his stricken friend and doesn’t leave him till he’s dead. Georg drifts into a friendship with the dead friend’s young son, Driss. Their street soccer blossoms quickly into a surrogate fatherhood that leads to double heartbreak when they’re parted. 

Georg’s attempt to deliver two letters to the outlawed Communist writer Wiede opens into another complex of emotional connections. Wiede killed himself in despair at his wife Marie’s leaving him. But her abandonment may have been out of political necessity and selflessness. She still loves him and wants to reunite. She’s falsely encouraged by the embassy reports that Wiede is proceeding with their plans to emigrate to Mexico. They, of course, are deceived by Georg’s having found himself slipped into Wiede’s identity. 

Marie is involved in another love affair with the dedicated paediatrician Richard. Though he feels bound to emigrate to start a hospital, he can’t abandon Marie. But she can’t leave off her commitment to recover her husband. As she and Georg find themselves drawn to each other, she agrees to leave with him only because she believes she will find Wiede on board. Georg tells her he’s dead but can’t bring himself to explain that he is now the “Wiede” she’s confident of meeting.

That is a lot of love. In such a troubled time, a time of such brutish, unnatural assault upon human rights, normal conventions no longer apply. Richard, Marie and Georg form a romantic quadrangle that only confirms her commitment to Wiede. The writer’s suicide may have been out of despair, but Richard’s and Georg’s sacrifices of their love for Marie are heroically selfless.  

Of course even their virtue is doomed. If the evil of tyrants doesn’t get them, there is always their malevolent aid, Destiny.  

The ending is open. We don’t know if Driss and his mother Melissa made it over the mountains. Melissa being deaf and dumb means her young son has massive adult responsibilities. His doom is imaged in his face being constantly shot in shadow. In losing Georg Driss loses his last hope of ever being just a child.Their old room briefly filled with immigrants reveals another bunch of driven, doomed souls. 

Melissa being deprived of speech is a metaphor for the period’s political silencing of individual voices, the government’s poisoning of communication. Her antithesis is the range of story-telling in the film. The woman in the street and the hotel manager both “tell” on Georg. 

The film’s sudden introduction of a third-person narrator confirms that narrative is a theme of the film. Wiede’s last work becomes a relic of a lost culture, freedom and spirit of resistance. So, too, the refugees compulsively unload their own personal stories. They confirm their existence and erect stories of survival— for now. 

      Under such horrible political conditions we make up stories to hide ourselves, like Georg’s embassy claim — as “Wiede” —to retire from writing. Or a fiction is devised to impose some meaning on a broken life. Thus the dog-keeper gussies herself up and has one last splash, a luxury evening dinner with the possibility of romance around her — before mid-cigarette diving to death.    

      The narrator’s intervention may also suggest Georg did not make it over the Pyrenees either. He can’t tell his own story. 

But the film ends open. We don’t know what happened to any of the characters. We can assume the worst. But Marie’s last appearance could raise the hope of a miraculous saving — or it’s a manifestation of how Georg remains haunted by his thwarted generosity. 

In any case the film closes on a musical eruption consistent with the film’s refusal to be rooted in any one time period: the Talking Heads’ trip on “the road to nowhere.” 
     These characters’ lives reveal a reality distant from the security Georg recalls from his mother’s nursery song, in which a range of animals find their way to their homes. Here there is no home, no secure emotional roots, despite the proliferation of people needing and committing to emotional relationships. Here the fascist government has stripped all lives of security and warmth, leaving everyone in — transit. And indeed, it’s a pretty sick transit, Gloria.