Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1163844
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 8 SEPTEMBER 2019 FILM FILM FIRST things first. Transit, written and directed by Chris- tian Petzold and one of the most attention-grabbing Ger- man films to be released to international audiences this year, is a work of speculative fiction. Specifically, it slots in rather nicely with the kind of alternate history – even out- right sci-fi – that character- ises the work of authors like Philip K. Dick, whose Man in the High Castle, now also a cult TV series, presents a chilling scenario of how the world would have dealt with the Nazis not, in fact, losing the Second World War. While Petzold's latest fea- ture may not operate on so broad and ambitious a narra- tive canvas as the likes of The Man in the High Castle, its speculative bona fides are es- tablished in more direct and artful ways. Unlike lesser works of this ilk – that is, the dross that's unloaded on us on a regu- lar basis by our corporate overlords of Marvel and DC – Petzold uses the strange scenario as a mechanism of estrangement, shoving us in- to the proceedings with nary an explanatory monologue and fully expecting us to stand ramrod-straight in our seats and just keep up. Our introduction to this off-kilter version of our own world begins with a rapid- fire exchange between Georg (Franz Rogowski) and Paul (Sebastian Hülk) – the two are hunched over in a Paris coffee shop as the latter lays out the mission: Georg is to deliver letters to a dissent- ing writer fleeing the regime, whose tentacles stretch out into France. But as he searches for the persecuted scribe, Weidel, he soon discovers that he's slit his wrists in a hotel room, leaving Georg with nowhere left to run. Assuming the dead writer's identity, Georg heads to Mar- seille in the hope of laying low until he can somehow find his way to America. But his goals are complicated with the appearance of the beauti- ful Marie (Paula Beer) – Wei- del's forlorn widow, who is now hiding out with a doctor, Richard (Godehard Giese), and who harbours the vain but persistent hope of seeing her husband once again. Based on the Anna Seghers novel of the same name pub- lished in 1942 but updated into a deliberately fudged historical reality, Petzold's film has drawn comparison to another cultural mainstay from that same year: Casa- blanca, another wartime tale of almost-lovers evading cap- ture and attempting to weave their way across arbitrary, authoritarian borders during wartime. Given that Michael Curtiz's Humphrey Bogart and Ing- mar Bergman-starring film is often listed among one of the greatest American films of all time, this makes for a lofty comparison. Luckily, Petzold acknowledges the in- fluence without leaning on Conceptually playful though sneakily poignant, Christian Petzold's unique allegory about the refugee experience creates a beguiling and thought- provocting speculative space Teodor Reljic Lost souls: Maria (Paula Beer) and Georg (Franz Rogowski) are almost-lovers caught in an equally ambivalent and maddening state of bureaucratic oppression The road to nowhere