CW: contains spoilers for the film Transit (2018).
In Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), the main character, Georg (Franz Rogowski), tells a story to the US Consulate (Trystan Pütter) about a person who arrives in Limbo and stands before the door to the afterlife. The person is told to wait to hear their judgement and proceeds to wait for an eternity before eventually they are told that they have been in Hell all along.
Georg’s story serves as a synecdoche for the whole film: everyone in the film’s version of Marseille is waiting for one thing or another. The people that Georg meets in the Mexican and US consulate buildings are waiting for visas, for transit papers, for passages on ships. Georg befriends Melissa (Maryam Zaree) and her young son Driss (Lilien Batman) who are waiting for Driss’ asthma attacks to pass so they can travel to the mountains. Georg becomes involved with Marie (Paula Beer) who is waiting for her husband so they can travel to Mexico together. As fascism sweeps south through occupied France, every character in the port town is forced to wait before they can escape.
Franz Kafka’s work is the film’s most obvious cultural touchstone. Georg’s story — also present in Anna Seghers’ (1944) original novel (Romney, 2019, p. 31) — is superficially similar to Kafka’s (1915) parable ‘Before the Law’. The film’s links to Kafka are emphasised on the posters for the English language market which quote David Ehrlich’s (2018) IndieWire review referring to Transit as “like a remake of Casablanca [1942] as written by Franz Kafka”. Like Kafka’s characters, the characters in Transit are trapped in cycles of never-ending and comically absurd bureaucratic procedures. Asking about a hotel room to stay in during his (planned to be) brief stay in Marseille, Georg is told that he’s welcome to stay only if he can prove that he intends to leave.
The film’s emphasis on waiting also alludes to Albert Camus’ and Samuel Beckett’s absurdism. Georg is Sisyphus, endlessly repeating the same actions day after day in the hope that eventually something will change. The endless repetition is shown in subtle ways beyond Georg’s repeated visits to the consulate buildings. Georg eats pizza and drinks wine at every meals. He sits at the same seat at the same table at the same bar. The ‘pizza du jour’ sign in the background never changes. Georg relives the same day again and again: a day of wandering the labyrinth of bureaucracy to get the papers he needs to escape; a day in which the pizza du jour is always ‘Neopolitan’.
The film’s absurdist philosophy also comes through in various elements that create unreal and uncanny effects to distance the viewer and emphasise the hellish nature of this absurd environment. The film’s narration often describes scenes as they happen but the visuals don’t quite match the narration: we’re told that characters shook their heads or kissed but that doesn’t match what we see the characters do on-screen. As Catherine Wheatley’s (2019) Sight & Sound review points out, several actors have the uncanny look of other actors — the lead, Franz Rogowski, bears a definite but imperfect resemblance to Joaquin Phoenix — that make them like “strange facsimiles of the stars they resemble, waxwork versions.” The overall effect is disorienting and distancing in a parallel of the disorientation and unreality integral to fascism. We as the audience can’t trust our own interpretation of the events we see. We’re unable to determine what is real and what is fiction. The world is subtly… wrong.
Most disorienting is Petzold’s decision to film this story of 1940s refugees in contemporary France. Georg and his compatriots are refugees fleeing the fascists of early 20th Century Europe but they so do on modern streets, on modern trains, on modern cruise ships. The film is peppered with ahistorical references: an architect takes Georg to see a bridge that wasn’t built at the time of the French occupation. It’s as if Georg has been repeating this same sequence of events from 1940 to the present day: as if he’s spent several lifetimes waiting for his escape; as if his ghost haunts the present doomed to repeat his flight from the most horrifying and shameful event in human history.
Transit depicts how fascism condemns us all to waiting and uncertainty; how fascism’s bureaucracy and administration of humans dooms us to eternal and inhuman repetitions. Jean-Paul Sartre (1944/1986) wrote that ‘Hell is other people’. Transit tells us that ‘Hell is waiting for other people’.
references
David Ehrlich, 2018, ‘’Transit’ Review: Christian Petzold’s Beguiling Refugee Romance Is Like a Kafkaesque ‘Casablanca’’, IndieWire, 17 February 2018 <https://www.indiewire.com/2018/02/transit-review-christian-petzold-1201929897/>
Franz Kafka, 1915. ‘Before the Law’, Selbstwehr.
Jonathan Romney, 2019, ‘The roads to freedom’, Sight & Sound, September 2019, pp. 30–33.
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944/1986, No exit: and three other plays, translated from French by Lionel Abel, Vintage International, New York.
Anna Seghers, 1944, Transit, translated from German by James Austin Galston, Little, Brown: London.
Catherine Wheatley, 2019 ‘Transit’, Sight & Sound, September 2019, pp. 79–80.
