Fran Magazine: Issue #72

Continued thoughts on Transit (2018), Phoenix (2014), and Oppenheimer (two weeks ago)

Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). This issue is for paid subscribers only. Enjoy a short excerpt or consider upgrading your subscription today.

Out of time

I have been thinking a lot about Christian Petzold’s last decade of work. I’ve been mostly thinking of Transit, especially after seeing Christian Petzold’s Afire and revisiting Christian Petzold’s Undine for a forthcoming essay in Bright Wall/Dark Room. I remember going to see Transit with Spencer at Lincoln Center when it came out — we were both pretty awestruck by it.

Like Petzold’s 2014 film, Phoenix, Transit is a “World War II movie”; maybe even “a Holocaust movie.” Phoenix is in direct conversation with the Holocaust: a Jewish woman Nelly (Nina Hoss <3) who survived her time in Auschwitz only to be shot in the face in the war’s waning days. Following liberation, Nelly returns home to her husband, the man who sold her out to the Nazis; he does not recognize her, however, and plans to use her somewhat likeness to cash in on his presumed-dead wife’s family money. Nasty! The film is dark and seductive, a clear riff on Vertigo, and led with great force by Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld (hot, sadly) who have great chemistry put to effect in Petzold’s film prior, Barbara.

Transit, however, is in indirect conversation with the second world war: it is shot in modern day — there are modern cars, modern amenities, whatever — but the characters do not engage in the modern world. They use typewriters, handwrite letters, dressed in dated clothing. You never see someone use a cell phone. It’s a daring, beautifully executed gambit: a period piece within the modern world. Transit allowed the past and present to intermix. The film concerns ethnic and political outcasts being rounded up and taken away in France. It is hard not to read as Holocaust metaphor, but we never hear any of the tell-tale terms.

beer & rogowsky in transit