In Christian Petzold’s last film, Phoenix, he dealt with issues of betrayal, trauma, love and the swirling mass of things that we use to make up our identites and, bolstered by two magnificent lead performances, he crafted one of the most perfect films I’ve ever seen. In this film, he deals with all of those issues again, but the film is one I am far more mixed on than I was on Phoenix. In this movie, a German refugee flees to Marseilles, desperate to escape France before the invading German army takes over completely. While in Marseilles, he finds himself caught in a bureaucratic nightmare along with a motley crew of other refugees seeking letters of transit. The influences here are obvious; it’s everything from Casablanca to Kafka. But the film has an attention grabbing hook that has driven most of the press the movie’s gotten; boiled down to its simplest terms, it’s a story of World War II, but it takes place in the modern world with none of the references changed. So, the German army is marching across France, people are being rounded up and placed in camps and so on, but the police uniforms are modern, the cars are modern, the dress is modern, etc. The film’s world isn’t quite so simple as that. Technology isn’t entirely modern, for example; there are no cellphones, all the offices are outfitted with typewriters instead of computers and, given the cramped, hot offices and apartments we see, there seems to be no air-conditioning to speak of. This is really smart on Petzold’s part, in my opinion; adding cellphones or the internet to this story would render it, well, it simply couldn’t happen because large portions of the plot are driven by cases of mistaken identity that, in an era of widely disseminated photographs, wouldn’t happen. But seeing this story of concentration camps and militarized police raids in the modern day is appropriatingly jarring, mostly because of the way we see life simply progressing normally around the story. When we see a man or woman in modern dress stroll by in the background, sipping coffee, or see a hybrid car drive by in the background, it’s easy to see ourselves in those backgrounds, doing what in reality we are doing, which is going about our normal day to day lives while refugee crises spin out of control all around the world and governments become more and more fascist and oppressive. This story of refugees, concentration camps and round-up raids are something we’re used to seeing in the context of World War II, but the reality is that they are happening now, today, and, by putting this story in the modern context, Petzold really hits us hard with that.
The story itself is a good one; like Phoenix, it borrows heavily from the thriller genre, even though it’s slowly paced and hardly a pulse-pounder, so the story has twists and turns enough that I would urge you to see the movie knowing as little as possible. A key twist that comes about half-way through the film, if not even later than that, is typically spoiled in even the one sentence plot summaries I’ve seen, so avoid those. The movie has two pretty big problems that hobble it and keep it from reaching anything even approaching the quality I was hoping for out of it. The film has a clunky, entirely unnecessary voice-over narration; I didn’t care for the character that was doing the narration, who is a side character, and I found it to all too often just be repetitive. I think Petzold was going for a kind of noir feeling and the idea of having a side character narrate a story from the perspective of a divorced observer is a venerable one and one I often like a lot, but it doesn’t work here at all. The second, bigger problem is the lead performance by Franz Rogowski. He has an interesting look, not at all like a movie star, and Petzold likes those kind of faces, if you know what I mean. But he’s not a professional actor either and he’s just out of his depth; Petzold likes minimal performances, but, contrary to popular opinion, it takes a tremendous amount of talent to give a performance where you don’t do a lot. Rogowski is minimal, but there’s nothing really behind his eyes and often he just kind of seems to be standing around and looking, frankly, dull and uninterested. A minimal performance, like the one Nina Hoss gave in Phoenix, for instance, should make us feel the emotions that are locked beneath the minimal exterior and when an actor is still, we should feel that they’re repressing their emotions in someway or struggling with them on the inside. Rogowski never gave me that feeling and when I found out that he was originally a model, not an actor, it kind of unlocked the problems with his performance for me. He knows how to stand and to hold a kind of unnatural stillness in his face and body, but he’s doing nothing but the exterior work. Sometimes an actor can give a really good performance by focusing on exterior stuff, but Petzold is working on an interior level and when the exterior is minimal, you need an actor who can dig really deep on the interior level to find depth and emotion there. Rogowski doesn’t and, with a better actor in the lead role, this movie might have made it up to four stars, but it just doesn’t. The supporting cast is good though, so that helps. Paula Beer, a really exciting up-and-coming German actress that I recently saw in Never Look Away, has real pain and vulnerability as a refugee perpetually waiting for her husband to arrive so they can escape Marseilles together. Godehard Giese is heart-wrenching as an exhausted, despairing doctor. Lilien Batman gives a really natural and unforced performance as a child refugee; it’s the kind of part most kids would have absolutely ruined, but Batman is very natural and real. And Trystan Putter does a fantastic job with a very small, two-scene part as a worker at the American Consulate; it’s a great example of the old “no small parts, only small actors” maxim. He’s absolutely brilliant and I hope to see more from him in the future, though, you know, he’s a bit player in German movies, so I probably won’t unless he really takes off.
So, on the whole, I liked this movie and it’s kind of a testament to Petzold as a writer and a filmmaker that I’m as positive as I am on a movie where I disliked the lead performance. The movie is immaculately crafted and beautiful to look at and the script is filled with compelling ideas. The story is compelling and the supporting characters are all wonderful. So I do recommend this movie; and Rogowski may work better for others and, if Rogowski works for you, I’m super happy for you because that will make this movie really, really great for you. But he didn’t for me, so the movie can only go so far with him at the center of it. Still, Petzold is a great filmmaker and I’m excited to see where he goes next. He has said that Transit is the final film in a trilogy, with Barbara and Phoenix as the first two entries, about love under oppressive regimes. So, no predicting where he goes next, but, while Transit falls far short of greatness, I’ll be taking that trip along with him. 3 stars.
tl;dr – a weak lead performance hobbles this otherwise excellent film; a compelling story and immaculate craftsmanship elevate things. 3 stars.