Transit (2018)

TRANSIT  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Christian Petzold
    Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese,
    Lilien Batman, Maryam Zaree, Barbara Auer
A man has to escape from France, where people without papers are being rounded up in a widespread campaign of "cleansing." The man gets to Marseilles, where he delivers a couple of letters as a favor for a friend and ends up assuming the identity of a dead writer, which brings him into contact with the writer's estranged wife, who doesn't know her husband is dead. He tries to tell her. She doesn't believe it. There's a boat sailing in a couple of weeks. It's their last chance to get out of France. This is, in all kinds of ways, a study in dislocation. It's based on a novel written during  World  War Two, but the movie takes place in the present day, and the man trying to escape is German. There are layers and layers to the story, to the point where the voiceover narration and what you see on the screen don't always match up, and at times contradict each other. It's like "Casablanca" meets "The Passenger" meets one of those Aki Kaurismaki movies like "Le Havre" or "The Other Side of Hope". There's not much in the way of comic relief, just a pervasive sense of being displaced, and trapped.