NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

THE TITLE OF CHRISTIAN PETZOLD’S NEWEST FILM packs a lot of meaning into two syllables. It refers to the papers sought by refugees desperate to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe—transit visas, which permit the holder to pass through a country provided they don’t stay. But the word “transit” starts a train of thought that passes through “transitional” and “transitory,” through ideas about in-betweenness and ambivalence that have run throughout the director’s work.

Since the mid-1990s, Petzold has fashioned a series of stripped-down yet fiercely engrossing dramas that marry the satisfactions of traditional narrative with a mood of dislocation and transience. His characters tend to be adrift in lives that are somehow provisional, restless yet becalmed, caught between escaping from the past and sinking in its nets. The family in The State I Am In (2000) is compelled to wander nomadically because of the parents’ long-ago crimes as left-wing radicals. The protagonist of Yella (2007) escapes from an abusive husband into a world of blandly generic hotels and chilly corporate meeting rooms, but is haunted by echoes and visions of her trauma. The heroine of Phoenix (2014), a Holocaust survivor, is a revenant, gradually and painfully trying to reconstruct her shattered face and identity. She is stranded not in space but in time, unable to move forward because the backward pull of the past is so strong. “Cinema loves phantoms,” the director has said. “Perhaps because it, too, is a space of transit, an interim realm in which we, the viewers, are concurrently absent and present.”

These themes appeared as early as Petzold’s film school graduation project, (1995), which opens with a map of Europe spread out on a café table. Two hands, a man’s and a woman’s, wander over the map, tracing routes, searching in vain for a