TRANSIT (2018)

More award-winning mediocrity from writer/director Christian Petzold, not too far off his last award-winner, PHOENIX/’14, where he grafted ‘40s melodrama (war victim searches for Pre-War life in Post-War Berlin sporting a new, surgically unrecognizable face) with kitchen-sink realism.  (Huzzahs on the Film Fest Circuit.)  Now, in early WWII Paris a morally ambiguous young man assumes a dead writer’s identity, hoping to slip out of France from Marseilles.  Instead, he meets & falls for the dead man’s widow, already in a new relationship yet unable to believe her husband has died.  Well, somebody’s gonna use those letters of transit to Mexico, but who?  Petzold purposefully obscures the simple plot (name tags would have helped), and stumbles over a subplot involving an asthmatic boy & his deaf/mute mother as everyone in Marseilles waits for their boat of passage.  (Berthold Brecht’s lost CASABLANCA rewrite?)  And yet, something of a masterstroke in presentation reps a breakthru for Petzold who flaunts all period protocol: sets, technology, costumes, makeup, and films as if it’s all happening in 2018.  Jarring at first.  What year was the Nazi Occupation?  But it soon pays off, releasing us from the distancing effect 80 years of social & physical changes make.  Done all the time on Shakespeare & modern opera stagings; why not WWII?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Adapted from an Anna Seghers novel written at the time.  She’s best known for THE SEVENTH CROSS, filmed in 1943 by Fred Zinnemann with Spencer Tracy.      https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-seventh-cross-1944.html