Transit
[DVD]

Description

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION When a man flees France after a fascist invasion, he assumes the identity of a dead author whose papers he possesses. Stuck in Marseilles, he meets a young woman desperate to find her missing husband - the very man he's impersonating. REVIEW Franz Rogowski stars as Georg, a German in Paris during an increasingly tense and violent occupation. Seghers book was released in 1944 and set in 1942, so the story at that time was about the Nazis, but Petzold boldly chooses to update the story to modern times without really clarifying the threat. We just know that people are being rounded up and the country is increasingly unsafe. Before we ve even seen the title card, police sirens have been heard three times. There s a sense of dread and urgency that s amplified by leaving the threat as undefined as active police cars in the street and enhanced discussion of things like travel papers. Especially with our current state of the world and its threats of violence amidst increased polarization, the themes of Transit have added resonance by making this a 10s story instead of a 40s one. In Paris, Georg is asked to take two pieces of correspondence to a writer named Weidel. When Georg gets to the hotel, he finds a bathroom covered in the blood of the man he was supposed to meet, who has committed suicide. He takes the writer's belongings and jumps a train with a man named Heinz who has been injured. The two are headed to Marseilles to hop a boat to Mexico, where they might be safe, but Heinz dies on the journey. Two dead men will shape Georg s future, guiding him into the lives they left behind. - Brian Tallerico (4/4 Stars) --https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transit-2019 The past and present are a terrifying blur in Transit, a brilliant allegory set in France that opens amid wailing police sirens. The solitary man in a cafe sipping espresso doesn t flinch. He is soon joined by a second man who gives him a name: Georg. Why are you still here, the second man asks, Paris is being sealed off. In urgent tones, they discuss visas, danger, money. Georg agrees to deliver two letters and then steps into streets filled with jackboots and terror, a world in which time seems to have folded in on itself. An existential thriller about loss, trauma, statelessness and historical amnesia, Transit is the latest from the German director Christian Petzold, an electrifying, original filmmaker. Petzold is likely best known in the United States for Barbara, a slow-burning drama about an East German doctor who, after a failed attempt to go to the West, decides to stay. In Barbara, to voluntarily remain in a totalitarian dictatorship is an ethical choice, a form of resistance. There are no valorous choices in Transit, where leaving is a high-stakes necessity for Georg and the desperate, panicked refugees around him. To stay is to die. - Manohla Dargis --https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html

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