Liminal spaces FTW
“What’s the last great movie you’ve seen?”
For two years, I’ve immediately recalled the same answer when asked this question. This isn’t to say that I haven’t seen anything exceptional since watching Christian Petzold’s German drama Transit (2018), but it left a deep impression on my psyche that’s yet to be eclipsed.
I have a peculiar love of liminal spaces. I love the “between-ness” of movie theaters, airport lounges, trains, hotels, and planes.
Part of the reason why science fiction is my favorite genre is that I’m fascinated by its inherent freedom to eliminate boundaries of all kinds — physical, societal, earthly. I love these in-between zones for the same reason— they are places where the normal ways of being and interacting are displaced solely by universal languages of utility, like time, often in the pursuit of some grander objective or fundamental purpose.
When a state of transition becomes a fixed condition, what is made possible and what can be understood? Sometimes it’s the promise of connection with strangers that would be inconceivable otherwise; other times it’s the potential for matchless solitude in a world untethered.
In the case of Transit, the film captures the darker, dystopian underbelly of the liminal; a hypnotic purgatory. Where some films on the liminal are a bit too on the nose (see: Tom Hanks bathing in an airport bathroom sink in The Terminal (2004)), Transit captures an essence of the liminal with the profundity of an ancient parable.
It’s not entirely clear when we’re supposed to be throughout Transit — the film’s action begins in a conflict-ridden, German-occupied Paris. People with a certain political leaning or matching a target profile are at threat of being captured and “sent off”. Georg, played by Franz Rogowski, matches the profile, and thus embarks on a solo mission to flee to Mexico, via Paris and Marseilles — a dead-end port awash with refugees and forged transit papers. The setting brings to mind scenes from Casablanca and other WWII films, but there’s enough to disorient — the modern cars, the absence of swastikas, and a leading man without the suaveness of a Rick or the gallant backstory of a Laszlo.
In Paris, Georg is given a letter he’s asked to deliver to a famous writer, Franz Weidel, who is in Marseilles — and so his time of transit begins. He and another political refugee named Heinz, hop a train to Marseilles. Heinz is badly injured and doesn’t survive the journey. When George arrives, his new life is now inextricably linked to these two men and the people connected to them whom he encounters in Marseilles — the son of a dead father, a man who has committed suicide in a hotel bathroom, an unfaithful lover. Watching Georg, an everyman navigating moral quandaries in purgatory whilst under constant threat, the film pushes you to imagine yourself in his every position — who would I be, how would I react, what decisions would I make?
While many who have remarked on the film have pointed out the similarity of the byzantine extradition rigamarole in Transit to the bureaucratic nightmare of the The Trial, I think there is another work by Kafka that’s more fitting. The feeling Transit left with me, and leaves me with to this day, is more reminiscent of one of his short stories.
An Imperial Message, is a short story about you. You’re just a lowly peasant, and a special, secret letter has been penned specifically to you, from the Emperor. It’s en route on a long journey from his stately palace, but the letter will never make it to you.
“Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.”
— Franz Kafka, An Imperial Message
That’s a feeling of yearning.
Transit’s punch packs the same sorrowful hopelessness of the futility of existence and asks us—what can we understand from a state of transit as a state of being?
Score: 92/100
For fans of the liminal…
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