A sunlit day in Paris. Police vans scream by, sirens on full volume, hurtling through the narrow streets. Heavily armed cops tumble out of the vans and grab passersby, lining them up against walls, and asking for identification papers. Other police teams start entering houses, barking dogs straining at their leashes.
Anyone who’s been in Paris recently might have seen at least some of this nakabandhi a la Francaise. When I was in Paris for a few days recently, I twice saw convoys of CRS wail through the traffic, the French heavy police chasing down some protest somewhere.
Not quite this way
In the film I’m watching though, the whole thing is ramped up a touch, the dogs and the demand for ID papers is ‘wrong’, in that it doesn’t happen quite this way nowadays, but it also rings true in that it could easily happen if an emergency of some sort was declared, not only in France but in the U.K., Germany, or the U.S.
In the film, as the police round up suspects, two men huddle inside a bar. One of them asks his friend to deliver a letter to a man, a writer, hiding in a hotel nearby. The friend agrees reluctantly and slips into the street and then down an alleyway towards the hotel.
As you watch the man walking you realise that both these characters are wearing clothes from another time not too long ago, maybe mid-20th century. The man makes his way up to the room of the fugitive writer and finds that he has killed himself. What is left behind is the typewritten manuscript of a novel. That, and a passport that shows the writer to be a German citizen of the Third Reich.
Anna Seghers was a German Jewish novelist who managed to escape from Hitler’s Germany in 1942 and make her way to Mexico. It was there that she wrote Transit , regarded as her best book and one of the greatest German novels of the 20th century.
In the France of today
Christian Petzold’s 2018 film of the book takes on a brilliant conceit. Petzold sets the action in the France of today, in contemporary Paris and Marseilles (with a wholly modern goods train in between). Though the Wehrmacht and the SS did indeed round up citizens using guns and dogs, we see no period uniforms on the police, and their actions are thus distilled into the actions of draconian police/army/paramilitary everywhere and across all modern times. The only concession the script makes to the original period is that no one has any mobile phones because this would impact the plot. In an unnerving collapsing of historical and present time, all the main characters wear clothes from the 1940s while everybody else is attired as they would be today.
Without giving away the plot further, the film builds up a great tension as the narrator moves through a Marseilles that is full of refugees of different ethnicities, white, black and Maghrebi. The whole nerve-racking business of procuring legit papers resonates with the desperate thousands trying to make their way to Europe, as it does with the jerking around and ruthless shakedowns you get with ever-tightening visa regimens. How human relationships change and distort under the tectonic pressure of the need to escape is beautifully explored and cuts across time.
Today — the film suggests — you could be a Libyan, Syrian or Somali willing to risk your life to enter Fortress Europe, yesterday you were, and possibly again tomorrow you could be, a white European desperately trying to escape, if not Hitler’s Fortress Europa then a continent that has become imprisoning and deadly in some other way. As an Indian and a subcontinental, watching Transit brought thoughts of the clampdown in Kashmir and the scandalous NRC in Assam, not to mention the Rohingyas trapped in Cox’s Bazaar. For a film to be able to move you from detailed specificity to such wide universality is an amazing achievement.
The writer is a filmmaker and columnist.
