User reviews

Transit is based on a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers, in turn based on her experiences as a German Jewish Communist political refugee in Marseilles trying to get out of Vichy France to Mexico. The protagonist is a German illegally in France, who travels from Paris to Marseilles, through chance assumes the identity of a dead German leftist writer who has an exit visa to Mexico, and finds himself involved with both the writer's estranged wife and the wife and son of a fellow German illegal.

What made the movie work for me is that it is not a routine World War II vintage costume drama. Director-Writer Christian Petzold has chosen to set the entire story in present day France. There are no Nazis, no swastikas, and no political explanations. There are only the omnipresent French police checking papers in the street, raiding hotels and apartments, and rounding up illegal aliens for deportation to an unnamed destination, assisted by good French citizens either venal or patriotic, and the desperate struggle of the refugees to procure legitimate identity and travel documents in the face of bureaucratic indifference or hostility. It all feels like it could be happening six months from now, there or, for that matter, here. The contemporary setting greatly increases the tension by taking away historical cues -- you have no idea how it is going to come out or whether the hero will make his getaway to Mexico.

Being original in the medium of film, when coupled with a fresh perspective for commonly repeated stories and themes, can lead to memorable performances with unique and refreshing interpretations, as seen here (although it seldom works with Shakespeare unless you modernise the dialogue). A 1940s passage is reimagined today within the bounds of those trying to escape conflict at a French port through any means they can establish, with the ever present threat of the authorities constantly and aggressively trying to prevent them. While the times may have changed and their reasons for escape evolved, this dilemma still remains in the real world today for some, to migrate at haste to survive.

German Director Christian Petzold's latest, TRANSIT, follows in the line of his excellent movies PHOENIX and BARBARA as another exploration of individual identity during periods of high political tensions. Based on a WWII novel, Petzold made the conscious decision to not be another period piece by setting in the present. Or, did he? The world we find in TRANSIT is like a parallel alternate reality. All shot in present day France. No visual effects. But, there is something off. Most of the clothes and props the main characters wear and use seem to come from the 1940s. Europe has been plunged into some unspecified war. Refugees are being expelled. Others desperate to emigrate legally to the Americas. Transit visas are like gold. Georg (Franz Rogowski) is a German stuck in Marseilles. By chance he acquires a Transit visa from another man, but, this requires him to take on the other man's identity. A mysterious woman, Marie (Paula Beer, recently seen in the exceptional NEVER LOOK AWAY) seems to keep appearing before him. Always elusive. Eventually, they meet, only to make things more complicated. Petzold is after something very tricky here. Without ever fully explaining the world he is building, we are plunged into it often leaving the viewer as baffled as the characters. The parallels to the refugee crisis in present day Europe are obvious (Georg interacts with an African woman and her child, and later, with a Muslim family), but never hammered home. Stylistically, Petzold has created an odd blend between a Noirish CASABLANCA and a totalitarian Orwellian 1984 present, all by way of Antonioni's THE PASSENGER. The past and present fold in and out, like something out of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. TRANSIT is a heady mix that won't be for all tastes, and Petzold doesn't fully command this world as well as he has in his past features. Still, it's a movie that's hard to shake. The acting is quite strong including the two leads, and a particularly strong supporting bit by Barbara Auer. TRANSIT may not be to the level of Petzold's previous few pictures, but, it's a worthy entry that lingers in the mind.

This is an excellent, if somewhat heavy drama. Excellent acting. The plot obviously romanticised and, given the dystopian premise, unbelievable yet eminently relatable. A reverse WWII refugee story of love and self realisation.

I enjoyed it and certainly felt a note of anguish at refugee plights the world over.

A good movie!

"Transit" (2018 release from Germany; 101 min.) brings the story of Georg. As the movie opens, Georg and another German guy meet up at a cafe in Paris. The guy asks Georg to drop off two letters at an acquaintance's apartment, a writer named Weidel. When Georg arrives at the apartment, it turns out Weidel committed suicide the day before. In the ensuing confusion, Georg takes Weidel's travel documents and latest manuscript. Meanwhile, Paris is getting overrun by the fascists, and Georg manages to slip out by train to Marseille... At this point we are not even 15 min. into the movie, but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this is the latest film from German director Christian Petzold, whose prior films include The State I'm In, Gespenster, Yella, Barbara, and Phoenix, just to name those, and all of them brilliant. Frankly, Petzold is one of the very best European directors of this generation, period. Every single new film of his is an event, a milestone. Here he takes the 1944 novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, and transposes it to the big screen, but with one major change: the setting is today's France. Yes, a 1944 WWII tale dealing with visas and travel documents, refugees, and cleansing of undesirables, is set in this day and age, where one can argue these very elements also exist (albeit in slightly different ways). Another striking difference: Nina Hoss, who has played the female lead in every single Petzold movie since 2007's Yella, is noticeably absent here. The female lead in "Transit" is played by Paula Beer, a German up-and-coming actress whom we saw just a few months back in "Never Look Away". But even more importantly is the male lead performance by Franz Rogowski, whom I was not familiar with. His nuanced performance as the tormented refugee is commanding. Not to mention that he appears in virtually every single frame of the movie. Bottom line: "Transit" left me transfixed from start to finish, and is a great addition to Petzold's already impressive body of work.

"Transit" premiered at last year's Berlin film festival, and now a year later finally made its way to my art-house theater in Cincinnati. Better late than never. The Saturday early evening screening where I saw this at was attended so-so (about 10 people), which is a darn shame. If you are in the mood for a top notch quality foreign film dealing with issues that were relevant in 1944 and remain so today, and coincidentally directed by one of the best in the business, I'd readily suggest you check out "Transit", be it in the theater (if you still can), on VOD, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray, and draw your own conclusion.

What I liked: the intertwined and unexpected developments of this love triangle (or square?) of WW2 refugees in Marseille... ingeniously "teleported" in the current days. What I didn't like: the somehow uncertain adaptation to a story of seemingly current events...

Transit is based on Anna Seghers's 1942 novel of the same name about a German concentration camp survivor seeking passage from Vichy Marseilles to North Africa, as the Nazis move ever closer to the city. However, rather than a 1:1 adaptation, the film is built upon a fascinating structural conceit - although it tells the same story as Segher's novel, it is set in the here and now. At least, some elements are set in the here and now. In fact, only part of the film's milieu is modern. So, although such things as cars, ships, weaponry, and police uniforms are all contemporary, there are no mobile phones, no computers, people still use typewriters and send letters, and the clothes worn by the characters are the same as would have been worn at the time. In essence, this means that the film is set neither entirely in 1942 nor entirely in 2019, but in a strange kind of temporal halfway-house, borrowing elements from each. There's a fairly obvious reason that writer/director Christian Petzold employs this strategy, and it has to be said, it works exceptionally well, with the film's thematic focus symbiotically intertwined with its aesthetic to a highly unusual degree. Petzold doesn't so much suggest that history is repeating itself, as postulate that there's no difference between then and now. Unfortunately, aside from this daring aesthetic gambit, not much else worked for me, with the plot somnolent and the characters void of any relatable emotion.

The film tells the story of Georg (Franz Rogowski) a young man on the run from the "fascists". In Paris, he's entrusted with delivering some papers to George Weidel, a communist author currently in the city. However, when Georg goes to Weidel's hotel room, he finds the writer has committed suicide. Taking an unpublished manuscript, two letters from Weidel to his wife Marie, and Weidel's transit visa for passage to Mexico, Georg stows away on a train heading for Marseilles, one of the few European ports not yet under fascist control. Upon arriving, Georg visits the wife of a friend who died, Melissa (Maryam Zaree), to give her the bad news. However, she's deaf, and he has to explain the death through her young son, Driss (Lilien Batman), with whom he quickly forms a bond. Meanwhile, when he goes to the Mexican consulate to return Weidel's belongings, he is mistaken for Weidel himself, and he realises he has a chance to escape Europe, with Weidel booked on a ship sailing in a few days. As Georg awaits passage, he has several encounters with a mysterious woman, who, it is soon revealed is none other than Marie Weidel (Paula Beer), who is waiting for word from her husband. Not telling her that Weidel is dead, Georg finds himself falling for her.

Shot on location in Paris and Marseilles, everything from street signs to cars (including a few electric ones) to the front of buildings is modern, whilst Hans Fromm's crisp digital photography hasn't been aged in any way whatsoever. In terms of cultural signifiers, Petzold keeps it vague, although there is a reference to Dawn of the Dead (1978), with the closing credits featuring "Road to Nowhere" (1982). However, for everything that seems to locate the film in the 21st century, there's something to locate it in the 1940s, whether it be the absence of mobile phones, computers, and the internet, or the ubiquity of typewriters and letters. Along the same lines, Petzold keeps the politics generalised, with no mention of Nazis, concentration camps, or the Holocaust. Instead, the film makes reference to archetypal "fascists", never-defined "camps", and systemic "cleansing".

The combination of liminal elements of modernity and period-specific history sets up a temporal/cognitive dissonance which forces the audience to move beyond the abstract notion that what once happened could happen again. Instead, we are made to recognise that the difference between past and present is a semantic distinction only, and that that which once happened never really stopped happening. Indeed, given the resurgence of Neo-Fascism across Europe, built primarily on irrational xenophobic fears of the Other in the form of immigration, the refugee crisis is as bad today as it ever was in the 40s. The temporal dislocation also suggests both the specificity and the universality of the refugee experience - every refugee is fundamentally unique, but so too is the experience the same.

The other important aesthetic choice is the use of a very unusual voiceover narration. Introduced out of the blue as Georg begins reading Weidel's manuscript at around the 20-minute mark, there's no initial indication as to the narrator's identity or when the narration is taking place. Additionally, the narrator is unreliable, as on occasion he describes something differently to how we see it. The narration also "interacts" with the dialogue at one point - in a scene between Georg and Marie, their dialogue alternates with the VO; they get one part of a sentence and the VO completes it, or vice versa.

However, although I really liked the temporal dissonance, the experimental VO didn't work nearly as well, serving primarily to pull you out of the film as you try to answer a myriad of questions - where and when is the voice is coming from; what is its relationship to the narrative; are we hearing a character speak or someone outside the fabula; how can the narrator have access to Georg's innermost thoughts at some points but not at others; why is the voice able to accurately describe things not seen by Georg, but often inaccurately describe things which are; why does the narration seem to be ahead of the narrative at some points, and behind it at others; what is the purpose of the pseudo-break of the fourth wall by having the VO alternate with dialogue? I don't have answers to all of these questions, but I think the point of the destabilising/defamiliarising narration is to reinforce the experience of being a refugee, which is a mass of stories within stories and fragments that often contradict one another.

The film has more problems than just the VO, however. To suggest the disenfranchised nature of what it is to be a refugee, Petzold depicts Georg as a non-person; he has very little agency and is instead someone to whom things happen. In short, he's passive, less a protagonist than a witness. Passive characters can work extremely well in the right circumstances (think of Chance Gardner (Peter Sellers) in Being There (1979), or the most famous example, Hamlet), but here, passivity combines with a dearth of backstory and character development, whilst Rogowski plays the part without a hint of interiority. Easily the most successful scenes in the film are those showing his friendship with Driss because they're the only moments where he seems like a person rather than a narrative construct, they're the only parts of the film that ring emotionally true.

This friendship, however, is secondary to the love story between Georg and Marie. Except that it isn't a love story; there's no emotional realism to it whatsoever. I understand what Petzold is going for here. He doesn't want a Hollywood love story of fireworks and poetic monologues, he wants to show that the war and their status as refugees has stripped them of their identities, and they are now effectively shells. However, this in no way necessitates such a badly written relationship void of emotional truth.

What Petzold is trying to do in his characterisation of Georg is clear enough; as an archetypal refugee, Georg can't be seen to have much control over his affairs, and his time in Marseille must be static, an existence in-between more fully realised states. Petzold uses this to try to imply that to be divested of one's country is to be divested of one's identity. However, the extent of his passivity renders him completely unrealistic - he's not a person, he's a robot.

Tied to this is a lack of forward narrative momentum. Again, I understand that Petzold is trying to stay true to the experience, that the life of a refugee must necessarily involve a lot of waiting, repetition, and frustration. But again, it's the extent to which the film goes to suggest this. Yes, inertia is part of the theme insofar as the film depicts people suffering from crippling inertia, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the film needs to be so unrelentingly dull.

Easily the most egregious problem is one that arises from a combination of these issues - it's impossible to care about any of the characters. Think of films as varied as The Boat Is Full (1981), Le Havre (2011), or The Other Side of Hope (2017). All depict refugees, and all ring true emotionally, because they're populated by characters about whom we come to care. This is precisely what Transit is lacking. There is no pathos, with none of the characters coming across as anything but a cipher, a representative archetype onto which Petzold can project his thematic concerns. With little in the way of psychological verisimilitude or interiority, they simply never come alive as real people.

An intellectual film rather than an emotional one, Transit is cold and distant. And this coldness and distance has a cumulative effect, with the film eventually outlasting my patience. The temporal dissonance works extremely well, but it's really all the film has going for it. Petzold says some interesting things regarding the experience of refugees in the 21st century vis-à-vis refugees of World War II, and the mirror he holds up to our society isn't especially flattering. If only we could care about someone on screen. Anyone.

Georg (Franz Rogowski, "Tiger Girl"), a Jewish radio and TV technician fleeing from persecution in Germany en route to Marseilles, waits in a dimly lit café in Paris for a friend to show up. There is little atmosphere, no Rick or Sam to "play it again." When the friend arrives, the two men speak in muted tones about things associated with war: Occupation, forged documents, deportations, and the like. Though the word Nazi is never heard, we hear the blaring sound of police sirens moving up and down the streets while armed policeman wearing black suits and helmets stop people demanding to see their papers. So-called "illegals" are rounded up and rumors circulate that a "cleansing" will soon take place.

Based on the 1944 novel of the same name by German author Anna Seghers that mirrored her own experience escaping from the Nazis, all of the indicators in Christian Petzold's absorbing and emotionally authentic Transit persuade us that we are witnessing a drama set in World War II. When the film conflates the timeline to depict a modern day environment in Marseilles, France, however, we are deposited in a bewildering no-man's land of thwarted expectations. Buildings and dress are contemporary, yet transportation is limited to trains and ships, there are no hand-held communications devices, and transit visas are necessary to pass through certain countries. In the vernacular, the film is neither here nor there.

As narrated by an unidentified third party (Matthias Brandt, "Killing Stella"), when Georg is asked to deliver two letters to a writer secretly holed up in a nearby hotel, he discovers that the writer, a communist author named Weidel, has committed suicide by slashing his wrists. Ransacking through Weidel's possessions, he finds the author's German passport, the manuscript of a novel, two letters from his wife Marie, and a document offering a visa and safe passage to Mexico. Intending to bring the materials to Weidel's wife, Georg smuggles a dying man (Grégoire Monsaingeon, "K.O.") aboard a train headed to Marseilles, jumping off at his destination and leaving the dead man's body for others to discover. A modern Marseilles then becomes the film's focal point, a necessary destination for those coming and going and those trapped somewhere in between.

When Georg checks into a hotel, he is required to pay for a week in advance and is told incongruously that he must offer proof that he can leave or he will be considered an illegal. After he settles in, he visits the American consulate to obtain a visa to leave France which he believes will soon be occupied by unnamed forces. When the articulate but slyly suspicious consular official (Trystan Pütter, "Anonymous") assumes that Georg is the writer Weidel, he makes no effort to persuade him otherwise and willingly takes the boat ticket to Mexico that had been assigned to the man he is impersonating. In a Kafkaesque turn of events, Georg keeps bumping into Weidel's wife Marie (Paula Beer, "Franz"), the mysterious woman whose blue jacket and red blouse evokes the sultry Nina Hoss, one of Petzold's regulars.

In this hall of mirrors, Marie, unaware that her husband is dead, falls for Georg, the man who is impersonating him. Georg also becomes involved with the mute wife of the deceased man he brought back to Marseilles, and gets to know her young son Driss (Lilien Batman) whom he instructs in some soccer moves, takes him to a seaside playground, impresses him by repairing his broken radio, and sings him a poignant song from his childhood. It is all the more heartbreaking for Driss when Georg tells him he is going to leave for Mexico. Transit is a supercharged drama of human emotions and one of the best films of the year.

Rogowski, considered one of German's most "in-demand" actors, has an understated but powerful screen presence and is described by Petzold as a "great actor" who is able to balance "sadness and confidence, coldness and empathy" like "a dancer." Though Transit is without an overt political agenda, its comparison between the fascist world of the 1930s and 40s and today's anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of neo-Nazism cannot be mistaken. Petzold creates the maddening reality of a world where past, present, and future blend into one, a netherworld described in author Samuel Beckett's "Molloy" as being "without memory of morning or hope of night." While being "in transit" normally refers to the shipping status of an item one has recently purchased, in Petzold's universe, it is also the absence of belonging or, as in the Talking Heads' song played over the film's end credits, being on "the road to nowhere."

In the occupied Paris, the refugee Paul (Sebastian Hülk) offers a ride to Marseille to his friend Georg (Franz Rogowski) if he delivers some correspondence to the famous writer Franz Weidel at his hotel room. However, Geord finds that Weidel committed suicide in his bathroom and the hotel owner has discarded his body. Georg takes Weidel's documents and last manuscript with him to deliver to Paul at the bar, but the Germans have raided the place and arrested Paul. Georg flees to Marseille with his wounded friend, Heinz, hidden in a train wagon, but Heins dies during the journey. George befriends Heinz's son, the boy Driss (Lilien Batman), and gives the bad news to the widow, Melissa (Maryam Zaree), who is deaf and dumb and is also illegal. Georg goes to the Mexican Consulate to deliver Weidel's documents and is mistakenly taken by Weidel. He resolves to pose as the writer and receives visas and money for him and his wife Marie (Paula Beer) to leave France. He goes to the American Consulate to get a transit visa and in both opportunities, he sees a beautiful woman looking at him. When the asthmatic Driss has a crisis, Georg searches a doctor and finds Dr. Richard (Godehard Giese), who is the lover of Marie, the mysterious woman that Georg has seen at the consulates. Soon he learns that she is Weidel's wife and is waiting for him to reunite in their trip to Mexico. But both Georg and Richard have fallen in love with her.

"Transit" (2018) is a beautiful and tragic romance written during the World War II (in 1944) and adapted to the contemporary days, maybe to reduce the cost in costumes and locations. Georg's sacrifice and the triangle of love recalls Rick Blaine in "Casablanca" (1942), when he gives his ticket to Richard. The plot is engaging and holds the attention of the viewer until the very end. The conclusion is sad and more pessimist than in "Casablanca". My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Em Trânsito" ("In Transit")

I read 'Transit', by Anna Seghers, years ago. It is a fine book, one of the best novels about the plight of the German exiles who found themselves trapped in Marseille, circa 1940-1941, trying desperately to get out of Europe before the Nazis caught up with them. This new film announces itself as 'freely adapted' from the novel. Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. The other would be to say that it appropriates key elements of the book's plot and grinds them into an amorphous mess. Sort of like saying that 600 kilos of minced beef is a free adaptation of a cow. It may be the same flesh, but all the life has been bled from it.

The main problem is the decision to mix past and present. A number of German characters in contemporary France are forced to flee an unnamed enemy. We all know that, in 1940-1941, they were actually fleeing the Nazis. This is no minor point that can be simply written out of the plot. It is the essence of why the book was written, seeing as Seghers was a communist and a Jew. So, we have to buy into the premise of modern-day Germans hiding out from French police for no conceivable reason. Fair enough if this were some dystopian future scenario, except that they are constantly using 1940s objects, like old passports; dependent on 1940s technology, like trains and ships for transportation; and faced with distinctively 1940s problems, like trying to get transit visas through Spain and Portugal. After the initial half hour of getting used to, where you think this slippage back and forth in time might lead to something interesting, it just becomes tedious and pointless.

There is also an annoying attempt to strike a tone of political urgency, without actually taking a stand on anything. This happens because the German fugitives are tenuously linked to characters of Middle Eastern origin who live in Marseille. This forced proximity gives off the slightest whiff of a comparsion between the German exiles of yesteryear and the immigrants and refugees of today. That would be a provocative argument, but it never goes beyond subliminal posturing. By failing to come out and actually say something, the film stops well short of the weighty political intentions of the book.

The three stars are for the generally good production qualities. The film is well shot, edited and acted, though the soundtrack is annoying. It's the screenplay and directing that leave a lot to be desired.

What a lousy, clueless and messy movie. If this was adapted faithfully from a novel, then I'd say that novel also sucks big time! The movie was lazily trying to prescribe a chaos when the German Nazi had invaded the France in WWII, but didn't bother to change everything to look alike the 1940s. The lousy director decided just to use the current French localities such as Paris and Marseille to shoot this movie, so all the things showed in it were uptodate current, vehicles were all present models, cities were full of illegal immigrants from Africa, all the police forces were geared in modern weaponry. The worst and the weirdest thing of this movie was the ridiculous mix up of the languages, the narrative was in German, the characters who played those desperate German Jews fled to France, and all the consulars of the foreign nations, all speaking German, but sometimes, French was suddenly the major dialog.

If this movie was adapted from the specific novel, I don't think the author was in a very stable mental condition. What she tried to deliver was nothing but chaotic mixed-ups, then complete further messed up by the brainless screenplay writers and the moronic director.

The movie was a complete MESS! Some of the reviewers tried to show they were deeper and more intelligent than the other viewers, so they completely understood what's going on in this poorly scripted and brainlessly directed movie, but actually this movie got nothing to do with anything at all. A movie so lazily made without any endeavor, not even in the least to try as the TV series, "The Man in the High Castle", was such a shameless and shameful poor product by the German movie industries. A movie so shamelessly tried to fool the viewers with some stupid modern day "Existentialism" touch was just disgusting!

I haven't read it, but I suspect that Anna Segher's novel for which this movie, "Transit," is based is better than the adaptation. Besides the 1944 book featuring the immediacy of Nazism, WW2 and the Holocaust, the plot tricks here tend be more authorial than cinematic, narrative and not visual. There's the writer-turned-character as the protagonist assumes the identity of the dead author (Take that Barthes and your theory of "the death of the author" in appreciating literature! Oh, am I the only one excited by that?). There's his manuscript, or book-within-the-book. Characters tells stories within the grander dystopian romance, of the hardships they've endured to try to escape or the loved ones they've lost. The entire main plot is told by a marginal character of the framing story serving as narrator. This is strong, reflexive storytelling. The filmmakers don't add much to this, although the motif of looking through windows is aesthetically pleasing.

Partially updating the setting to a mysterious dystopia of approaching "ethnic cleansing," where typewriters, old passports and transit papers coexist with modern streets and fashion seems an odd, if not cheap, choice. It also risks making its "Casablanca" (1942/43) socially irrelevant. Hence, I think, the insertion of the deaf and mute mother and football-loving son, immigrants from the Maghreb. This plotline hints at where in the real world desperation to flee war-torn regions exists today, that people struggle to flee to Europe now, along with North American countries such as the U.S. and Mexico, with their promises of opportunity, peace and tolerance--whether they live up to those ideals is another matter. Problem is, this storyline matters so little that it could be cut from the picture without harming the main thrust. No more important than side characters like the woman with the dogs or the man boring the protagonist with his story about passport photos. The main narrative remains a novelistic "Casablanca" love triangle, and the rest don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Very well acted this movie reproduces perfectly the depressing mood of the time when the book was written(1944). Great idea to place it in the modern France.

"Transit" has a pretty cool premise. It's based on a WWII-era novel about refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. But the filmmakers present it as a story happening in the present day without updating the material. So people are still fleeing Europe because of a Fascist regime (though the word "Nazi" is never spoken), they travel primarily by boat, and there are no such thing as cell phones. But there are modern-day cars and dudes in athleisure wear jogging in the background. What this does is draw comparisons between the the plight of those escaping Fascism during WWII and the refugees of today fleeing war-torn countries.

The movie treats everything so matter of factly that the updated setting doesn't immediately strike one as incongruous. I didn't really even think about the lack of technology, for example, until I read other people's comments about the movie and then thought, "oh yeah, why didn't anyone have a cell phone?" It makes the world of today look not that different from the world of yesterday despite all humanity's promises to learn from its past.

"Transit" is a well-made movie with good acting, but it never really came alive for me. The whole thing remained a little too abstract and cerebral. I found myself admiring the exercise, but not especially involved in anything happening.

Grade: B+

Highly recommended. Imaginative setting, letters of transit, Occupied France, unrequited love, maybe a bit slow, making it seem a bit long at times, and an enigmatic ending, of course. The German actor a doppelgänger of Joaquin Phoenix. A sometimes intense, always intelligent, certainly worthwhile 'art' film set in Paris, Marseilles and your imagination. We all have waited in a bar, a glass of wine in front of us, waiting for a woman we love.

A german movie that dares. Now daring may be a bit too much credit, especially because we are talking about the Drama department, something German movies seem to relish in. But this has an edge, because of its interesting story and interesting characters.

Unfortunately one of the downfalls often with German movies is that the acting seems to vary at times. Emotion is not being conveyed as it should be. Dialog sounding like robots without emotion saying words. Of course others have even more issues with the movie, because it can seem dull and annoying at times too. But I felt the pacing was ok, and you don't something to happen every other minute. This is a slow burner and it works for and with the people involved in this. So yes quite a few flaws but still one of the better outputs of German cinema in the last couple of years

Throughout this movie I would find myself engrossed in the realistic emotional turmoil that the characters were going though. I loved that even though it was implied, they also never specifically said that it was a nazi regime and left the looming threat unnamed. The problem is found in the director or screenwriter's inability to trust the actors to show subtle emotion and for the audience to pick up on that emotion without it being spoon fed to us. I consistently found myself feeling for the characters in these tense emotional moment only for that feeling to be completely destroyed with annoyance at the narration that would start to dictate exactly what had just happened and what was currently happening on screen. Instead of completely spelling out what the audience was supposed to be feeling, the film would have been better off allowing it's audience to sit through those moments of silence and soundtrack to contemplate on the events being shown to us.

Set in present day Paris and Marseille but deliberately constructed as a first cousin to Michael Curtiz's "Casablanca", "Transit" is the strangest of 'romantic thrillers', a WW2 movie, not just in modern dress, but set in something like an alternative universe and it works...beautifully. Indeed this may be director Christian Petzold's best film so far, superbly filmed, (and totally believable), with a terrific central performance from Franz Rogowski. Of course, the plot isn't lifted directly from "Casablanca"; that might have been too easy but with a little imagination think what might have happened if Rick had left Paris for Marseille with Victor Laszlo in tow where he would meet, not one but two, Ilsa's.

In many respects this is a sci-fi film in plain clothes narrated by a watchful bar owner as if he were an author narrating his novel, (it's based on Anna Seghers' novel which was actually set during World War Two). You might think a suspension of disbelief would be essential but from quite early on in this picture everything that happens seems perfectly natural as if this place and these people were the bedrock of a very ordinary world. A remarkable film in so many ways.

This is a good movie. We enjoyed it. But the reason we rented it was based on the IMBD description of people escaping "Nazi-occupied France." Within the first few minutes you realize...oh, this is set in modern day. It's an adaptation of a book that told this story in the WW II timeframe. Hey, it's pretty good. Certainly for a home rental. But know going in it's not a WW II movie.

I love that what many people find interesting and smart I find to be the downfall of this movie. Making this movie in present day France makes absolutely no sense and comes off as a cheap way to tell this story. It's as if the director didn't have money to make a period piece so he decided to just say: the hell with it, and film it in present day. The problem here is that, for me, it didn't work at all, you'd need to adapt the screenplay to fit this change, and he didn't. If it was just an artistic decision, even worse, because this movie, as it is written, could only happen during WWII, and by taking that you lose much of the ambiance and paranoia typical of the era which would make for a much more compelling viewing experience. And it's a pity because it's a good story, kind of like a depressing Casablanca. But as it is, it's just a mess, an ugly mess.