Transit (2018)

“Who is the first to forget, he who is left, or she who left him?”

I saw Transit earlier this year, in January, and I had a lot of trouble following the plot and keeping track of the characters. The film still intrigued me, and I decided to read Transit, the novel on which it is based, by Anna Seghers. It is representative of postwar literature published in France: bleak, existential, a series of events that barely form a plot. That description doesn’t sound like a recommendation, does it? But I enjoyed the novel very much, enough to decide that I needed to see the film again. I’m not sure that reading the novel helped me understand the film any better; however, seeing the film a second time and keeping a list of the characters handy did the trick.

And I am really glad that I saw Transit a second time. It’s a haunting story of people trying to escape the occupation of France. Seghers’s novel was based on her experiences escaping Germany and occupied France, but the film changes several of the basic details. One is the fact that the film is set in the present, which makes its message about people escaping persecution even more poignant for modern-day viewers. The novel is a rather straightforward story of a man trying to flee the Nazis, but the film is a multilayered story within a story about a writer with an unfinished story, a manuscript.

Georg, the main protagonist of the film, needs to escape Paris because the occupying forces are closing in. He never explains why he needs to leave, and the occupying forces are never clearly identified. First, Georg was supposed to escape with his friend Heinz, then he meets Paul, who offers him money to take two letters to a writer named Weidel and space in a car to leave Paris. Georg accepts this new offer. When Georg arrives at Weidel’s hotel room, he learns that Weidel has killed himself by slashing his wrists. The hotel’s proprietor gives all of Weidel’s papers, including a passport and a manuscript, to Georg. But Georg’s plans fall apart when he chances upon a police roundup of several people, including Paul. He now falls back on his plan to help his friend Heinz.

Georg takes Heinz by train to meet Heinz’s wife Melissa and their son in Marseille. The original plan was to get Heinz to Marseille, and then Georg would escape to the hills and meet someone named Henry. A voice-over narrator joins the story while Georg and Heinz hide in one of the train’s railcars. The voice of this narrator is what viewers hear as Georg reads Weidel’s papers one by one—the manuscript; the letter from the Mexican consulate in Marseille; and the letter from Marie, Weidel’s wife. Heinz dies on the way to Marseille, and Georg has no choice but to leave him behind and continue by foot.

To find a hotel room in Marseille, Georg has to pay a week in advance because he does not have a residence permit. Part of the bureaucratic jigsaw puzzle meant to bedevil the population at large is that people can stay in Marseille only if they can prove, with a visa and ship’s passage, that they don’t want to stay. The next day, Georg goes to the Mexican consulate first to straighten out Weidel’s affairs. In the consulate, while he waits, people start to tell him their stories, which annoys him at first. But then he thinks to himself, “This is Marseille. It’s a port. And ports are places where stories are told, that’s what they’re there for. The people here have every right to tell stories. And be listened to.” Georg thinks this to himself, and viewers learn of it because he told this to the voice-over narrator. Even before the Mexican consul mistakes Georg for Weidel, Georg’s identity is already muddied by the narrator telling us what Georg was thinking instead of Georg telling it himself.

(This blog post about Transit contains spoilers.)

Georg intends to clear up the Weidel matter on his first visit to the Mexican consulate, but he is mistakenly identified as Weidel by an employee and then by the Mexican consul himself. The consul tells Georg that his wife (Weidel’s wife) Marie was just in the Mexican consulate two days earlier. Visas, two ship’s passages, and a money order are ready for them both, and now that both are in Marseille, Georg can take all of them. Georg and Marie Weidel, someone he has never met, need transit visas for the United States and Spain because they are stopovers on their trip to Mexico, and no stopover country will allow passengers to disembark for fear that they will never leave.

The Mexican consul asks Georg for the name of his wife as a way to prove his identity. Georg is able to remember Marie Weidel’s first name because he read the letter from her that Paul had asked him to deliver to Weidel in Paris. Georg tells the Mexican consul that his wife left him, and the Mexican consul asks Georg, “One thing interests me. It’s more of a question. Who is the first to forget, he who is left, or she who left him? I’m interested in your opinion as a writer.” This question, which starts this post, is asked by more than one character, and it underlines one of the deepest fears about their predicament: that of being forgotten entirely. Georg’s response: “I can hardly remember her.”

Georg meets Marie later in the film, and he begins to fall in love with her. He never tells Marie his real identity, and by a series of coincidences, his true identity is never revealed. Marie continues believing that her husband has arrived in Marseille and is looking for her because the Mexican consul keeps her updated with Georg’s (Weidel’s) visits. During one of their conversations, the question about being forgotten comes up again:

• Marie: “Who is the first to forget: he who is left, or she who left him? What do you think? [pause] He has forgotten me.”

• Georg: “Who?”

• Marie: “My husband.”

• Georg: “How do you know?”

• Marie: “The consul told me.”

• Georg: “What consul?”

• Marie: “The Mexican one.”

Marie is living in Marseille with a doctor named Richard. During this same conversation, she explains to Georg that Weidel wouldn’t leave Paris when she wanted to go, even though it was becoming more and more dangerous to stay. She and Richard fled the Germans together. She tells Georg, “They say that those who’ve been left never forget. But it’s not true. They have the sweet, sad songs. Pity is with them. Those who leave, no one is with them. They have no songs.”

Georg agrees to help Marie and gives her one of the ship’s passages that he received from the Mexican consul. He keeps the other for himself. Both are for the ship Montréal. When Marie tells him that she knows that her husband will be on the ship because the Mexican consul told her that her husband (but really Georg) picked up the passages and all the other papers for their escape, Georg decides to stay in Marseille. He goes to Richard and Marie’s apartment and offers his passage to Richard.

After the Montréal sails, Georg sees or thinks he sees Marie in the Mont Ventoux café looking for her husband. He tries to catch her, but she seems to vanish into thin air. He goes to the dock to check the Montréal’s passenger list and learns that it hit a mine and exploded. There were no survivors.

Georg goes back to the Mont Ventoux café, where viewers learn that he told his story to the bartender there (the bartender is the voice-over narrator) and that it is the bartender who is telling Georg’s story. The bartender tells Georg that he should leave or at least hide because the “cleansing” of Marseille has started. But Georg refuses to leave the café. He gives Weidel’s manuscript to the bartender for safekeeping. He is waiting for Marie. He turns around every time the bell over the front door of the café chimes. The very last shot is of Georg turning around and starting to smile, but viewers are never sure if Georg actually sees Marie when he turns around or if he is imagining her: The film ends without showing anything more than Georg turning around and starting to smile.

The structure of the film is complex and layered, which may put some people off, but I found it rich and satisfying, especially on second viewing. Unlike the novel, the story is told by the bartender at the Mont Ventoux café, who tells Georg’s story as Georg told it to him. Georg is also the bearer of Weidel’s last story, that of his manuscript. Even Georg’s identity is complex and multilayered, and perhaps he tells his story to the bartender so that he himself won’t be forgotten. On his first visit to the Mexican consulate in Marseille, Georg’s identity begins to be transformed, a process many people might find unsettling, but Georg seems to accept it as another way to escape.

I imagine that Transit is a film that reveals more and more on each subsequent viewing. And I think the effort is well worth it.

February 17, 2018 (Berlin), April 5, 2018 (Germany), release dates  •  Directed by Christian Petzold  •  Screenplay by Christian Petzold  •  Based on the novel Transit by Anna Seghers  •  Music by Stefan Will  •  Edited by Bettina Böhler  •  Cinematography by Hans Fromm

Franz Rogowski as Georg  •  Paula Beer as Marie  •  Godehard Giese as Richard  •  Lilien Batman as Driss  •  Maryam Zaree as Melissa  •  Ronald Kukulies as Heinz  •  Sebastien Hülk as Paul  •  Barbara Auer as the woman with two dogs  •  Matthias Brandt as the bartender at Mont Ventoux and the narrator  •  Alex Brendenühl as the Mexican consul

Distributed by Music Box Films  •  Produced by Schramm Film