Transit (Christian Petzold)

[Stay Puft]

TRANSIT
Dir. Christian Petzold

https://i.imgur.com/OyHILiS.jpg

IMDb page (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6675244/)

[Stay Puft]

I couldn't find a thread. Nobody on Match Cut seen this yet?

My favorite of the three Petzold films I've seen so far. His style really suits the story here. All this running, and nowhere to go. People sitting around, waiting to die.

[Peng]

I slightly prefer Phoenix, but this is pretty good too, and Petzold remains an absolute master of endings. What I wrote when I saw it a while back:

This is a ghost story, haunted in multiple parallels as if through hall of mirrors: past historical atrocity displaced to linger afresh (and repeat?) in modern time, dead people still hovering over the living that chase or benefit from them, and, to Transit’s slight detriment in my eyes, traces of Petzold’s previous work echoing in this new one.

It’s not a few narrative or thematic constructions similar to Phoenix, even down to a minor character’s fate, that bother me (which just feels like a director that keeps returning fascinatingly to his interests, a la Hong Sang-soo), but some of his execution this time out. Phoenix’s facelift of Vertigo feels like a simple, elegant, formidable surface that Nina Hoss’ character threatens to break free from, and in which she eventually does, while Transit has that same identity deception element, plus its exhilarating formal gambit, and then a convoluted, Casablanca-ish triangle of attraction and transit papers too. That last one provides one too many narrative complications that threatens to disrupt the film’s free-floating atmosphere of characters and history stuck in Kafkaesque stasis. Thus the film keeps me at arm’s length from these characters, and I don’t get to feel with its protagonist intensely the way I do with Phoenix.

It’s kind of frustrating, because on ambition and conceptual imagination alone, this has a high chance of exceeding that film. Yes, even down to the ending, which, despite the character(s) not really being felt, still destroys me completely, especially with that last frame. 8/10