Anna Seghers and Christian Petzold, 2018
#6,
2019 Skandies
So the story here is that fascists have taken power in Germany, and have now invaded France. Some Germans who had previously fled to France (communists, Jews) find themselves on the run again, trying to put a mountain range, or better yet an ocean, between themselves and the regime committed to exterminating them. The twist: it’s 2017.
Sort of. This is an adaptation of a novel that was both written and set during World War II, and the update to 2017 is purely a matter of the look of the clothes and the cars. We do see billboards with URLs on them, but the characters never use the Internet; the manuscript that plays such a key role in the story was banged out on a typewriter, not stored on a thumb drive. The refugees are scrambling to get a berth on a ship, not a ticket on the last flight to JFK. Still, I suppose there’s a case to be made that it is looking like the 1940s that makes a WWII story feel like it’s taking place at a safe temporal remove, one that Transit eliminates.
But I don’t know that this story would feel particularly far removed from modern concerns, even had it kept its period dress. I mean, at least to an American viewer, what could be more relevant in 2017 than “fascists have taken over my country and I gotta get out of here”? Or, more specifically, since this movie is about the difficulty the characters encounter in finding countries to take them in and even in getting countries to let them pass through—by awarding them the titular transit visas—what could be more relevant to an American viewer looking into contingency plans for a fascist takeover in 2025? Because in the absence of ties to the target country via ancestry or marriage, or a position in a multinational corporation that will transfer you to the target country, or the ability to buy your way in, securing indefinite residency in another country seems just about impossible. The protagonist of Transit discovers that his route out of occupied France is being mistaken for a celebrated author, but even that doesn’t get him into the U.S. or Canada or Australia—Mexico is the most developed country willing to take him in under his assumed identity. When I did some poking around during our trial run with fascism, I discovered that the most developed country willing to take in someone like me for longer than six months was Paraguay. Since then, even Paraguay has changed its policies in this regard. No transit out for me.
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