SLIFF 2018 Review – TRANSIT

TRANSIT screens at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival Thursday, Nov. 8 at 2:15pm and again Sunday, Nov. 11 at 3:00pm. Both screenings are at the Plaza Frontenac. Ticket information can be found HERE and HERE

Review by Stephen Tronicek

There’s a moment in the second act of Christian Petzold’s new film Transit that summarizes the strength of Petzold’s cinematic form. Georg (Frank Regowski), an immigrant who has fled to a new country, an impending occupation following him helps a young boy fix a radio. Once the radio is fixed a simple, yet longing, tune springs from it. Georg freezes and upon being asked by the little boy what the song is he recalls that it is one his mother sang him to sleep with.

There are many great, deeply personal things about Transit. The performances are beautiful and the rich colors of the frame create a world that is tangible to our touch. But on top of that, Petzold is working with metatextual tools that match our experience of the work with the characters. To put it simply, much like in Petzold’s masterpiece Pheonix, the theme is revealed through a song that means much more than just a song.

Said theme has to do with the things that must be sacrificed in order to survive: whether or not be love, our conceptions of love, or more straightforwardly the past that we thought was ours. Georg can only experience the song through the lens of the past, and we, as an audience can only experience the song/the moment through the lens of the films we’ve seen. Petzold smartly has the song sound like the famous, “The Little Organ Book: Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ – BWV 639,” by Johann Sabastian Bach, a song most famously used in Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful Solaris. That film lent itself to the emotional quality of existential malaise, a world caught in a slow-motion grinding forward and Bach’s piece held a quality that played into the theme of the work: when it was used, it was famously juxtaposed against Pier Brugal’s “The Hunters in the Snow,” a tableau of hunters returning home after a long winter. In Solaris, the juxtaposition of imagery was used to accentuate the sadness in the inability to return to a previous time or place. In Transit the illusion is used, similarly, to accentuate not only Georg’s ultimate goal of simply finding peace, but also to accentuate the deep suffering that is found when you must leave home, never to return.

It is that kind of detail that makes Transit such an exciting experience as it plays out in front of you. What is, on the surface, the story of a young man attempting to escape the horrors of a regime becomes deeply personal once the details are deconstructed before you. That should be more than enough reason to want to see it.