“Without question, the 2010s decade has been one of tumult and confusion, carried out from numerous different fronts and leaving one adrift in the chaos, struggling to hang on for dear life. I can’t think of a film that embodies that feeling better than Christian Petzold’s masterpiece Transit, whose central conceit deliberately mixes Anna Seghers’s source novel’s narrative of a World War II refugee attempting to leave Nazi-occupied France with what largely appears to be a present-day setting: modern cars, up-to-date military uniforms, flatscreen televisions hanging on a few walls.
“However, Transit can’t just be reduced to a well-executed conceit, no matter how daring and reorienting it becomes over the course of the film. For one, it is one of the most beguiling and mysterious cinematic romances in recent memory, all the more so because of how briefly it is consummated, how it appears at glancing moments throughout. Though Georg and Marie are very obviously intensely attracted to each other, the relationship is haunted by the bonds of history: her abiding pursuit of her (unbeknownst to her) deceased husband, his flight from the persecution he has suffered.
“Moreover, Transit interacts with its own shifting, spectral histories: World War II and the present, both separately and simultaneously; Seghers’s novel, which Petzold daringly and brilliantly distills on a narrative detail-by-detail basis; and perhaps most of all an entire cinematic and genre lineage. For Petzold, among his many staggering qualities, is the greatest practitioner of Classical Hollywood filmmaking today, in ethos if not in strict technical terms. His clean and gorgeous compositions and incredibly well-judged editing contribute to this, but even more important is his narrative sense, his genuine investment into the doomed desire for connection that acts as the driving engine.
“And at the head of this is Franz Rogowski’s performance, which fully inhabits all of the quiet strength, the fearful resistance that makes Transit so vital. The softness of his voice and the purely cinematic quality of his face — communicating an astonishing range of emotion with just the shifting of his mouth or eyes — pierce what could be an overly arch conceit, illuminating the political and interpersonal urgency with which Petzold operates. Both a state-of-the-world missive and a twist on classical filmic narratives, Transit defies all attempts to categorize it, continually evolving and complexifying the longer one looks at it.” ~ Ryan Swen
No comments:
Post a Comment