Transit
Christian Petzold’s progressive drift away from realism gathers pace in Transit, another melodrama of impossibility and despair that unfolds in a hyper-constructed amalgam of past and present as unstable as it is seamless. Yet the deliberately unresolved tension between ’40s Marseille and today is hardly the only element of slippage in the German director’s typically astute adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, as frictions of all kinds abound: between literature and cinema; between her ideas and his; between the explicit and the unsaid.
As begins, the police are already going door-to-door in Paris, yet Georg (Franz Rogowski) has no plans to leave, unlike his friend Paul (Sebastian Hülk), who is set to depart the next day. Paul asks Georg to deliver two letters to
