At this year's Berlin Film Festival, the most vocal film for the Golden Bear was Christian Petzold's Transit.
Christian Petzold, who was part of the Berlin Film Festival's "concubine" force, won the Golden Bear for his World War II film Barbara six years ago.
This year, the plot of "Transit" missed the Golden Bear Award, and the best picture award was won by romanian female director Adina Pintille's first feature film "Don't Touch Me". The defeat of "Transit" can be said to be "success is also history, and failure is also history". The film "Transit" is adapted from the novel of the same name by the famous German exile writer Anna Siggers. In order to escape the trial of the Nazi regime, Anna Siggers left Germany in 1933 and went into exile. In exile, Anna Sigges wrote novels with a strong sense of criticism, such as The Head Reward, Salvation, and The Seventh Cross, which brought her a worldwide reputation.
"Transit" is a work with a strong prose flavor, depicting the life of the exiles at that time and the difficulties they encountered. It can be said that no exile novel depicts in as much depth and detail as Transit that the group of exiles who remained in Marseille, France, during the winter of the turn of 1940 and 1941. Anna Siggers uses precise expression and artistic expression of real life to show in detail the despair and hope of the fugitives who were waiting for the ship at that time. Christian Petzold, who has already made World War II-themed films like Barbara and The Undead Bird, is certainly reluctant to repeat himself. In Transit, he showed fans his new narrative style. First, he transplanted the story that took place during World War II into the present.
The confusion of time and space makes people travel to the past in a trance, and when many modern objects appear, they will suddenly find that the so-called Nazism and World War II actually happened in the present, only replacing the form and content, and evolving into neo-Nazism caused by the problem of European immigration. The story of the film only uses the structure and general experience of the characters in the novel to tell the story of the German army approaching Paris, the air raid may destroy the entire city at any time, and the great purge movement inside the city is one after another. The male protagonist, German Gerber, as one of the refugees, fled from Paris to the port city of Marseille. He mistakenly obtained handwritten letters from the well-known writer Wieden and the original manuscript of the unpublished novel.
Wieden committed suicide alone in the hotel, the body was disposed of in secret, and almost no one knew of his death. So Georg, who fled to Marseille, half-pushed and half-pushed and half-acted as Wieden. He managed to get a ticket to escape at the embassy, and after ten days, he could escape the war and go to Mexico to live a peaceful and comfortable life. But his "affection" with the son of his dead companion,
Entangled with the "love" of writer Wieden's wife Mary,
Let him struggle between "going or staying". During World War II, the Germans occupied the invincible France in just a few months, and as early as a few years before the occupation, the German Jews or writers and scientists with discordant political tendencies began to flee. Marseille, France, as a port city, is home to a large number of exiles.
It was during those turbulent years that Anna Siggers, who was one of them, rewrote the documentary he saw with his own eyes into an artistic novel. At a time when neo-Nazism was on the rise of neo-Nazism, a far-right group sparked by the refugee problem in Europe, Christian Petzold boldly tied the two together. Moving the story of the Second World War period to the current European background, the sense of chronology is uncomfortable at first.
However, with the development of the plot, it can be seen that there are many ironies about the current world political structure and European social problems, and the director's experimental method of misplacing the time and space background is clever and effective. The interchange between the signifier and the signifier makes the thematic meaning self-evident: war and Nazis could make a comeback at any time, and the ghosts of the past did not slip away under the dangling daylight of the modern day.
Through the male protagonist Georg's brief exile in Marseille, "Transit" shows with his eyes the influence and repression of neo-Nazis on people's lives. All exiles face an identity crisis, and a lack of belonging leads to a sense of security that disappears. Geor replaced the novelist, but this favorable identity tormented his heart. Help the children of the dead compatriots fix the radio, but the soon-to-be-away georg can not provide long-term companionship, the children do not want to eat, and the final chocolate sundae is the collapse of family affection, the helpless collapse of conscience. Mary intervened in Georg's life again and again, a red dress, a shadow, and a touch of Grö's heart.
But when the mystery is revealed, it turns out that Mary is looking for a husband, that is, the writer Wieden who has been replaced by Georg, Georg's conscience is hit hard again. He possessed Mary first, but he was tormented by the problem of identity, and the time of departure was getting closer and closer, and this love was destined to be short, not yet beginning, and about to end. And the nagging fugitive conductor, the taciturn, wandering woman with the dog, and Geor's mute wife who lost his countrymen, all of which together make up a wonderful modern ukiyo-e.
They are well-dressed, but they are all miserable inside. The doctor embarked on a distant cruise ship, not wanting to end up hitting the iceberg of history. Look, no one can flee, or, it is only the body, the soul, and the heart that are always exiled.
"Transit" carries the legacy of history, empathizes with today, and makes the doubts of World War II and the horror of Nazis travel through time and space to the present. The terrible thing is that everything is not the nonsense and the imagery of the movie, they are really happening on the current European continent, stinging one uneasy heart after another. "Transit" borrows history and doubles the anxiety of modern people. The film's confusion in time and space, although it increases the thickness of the film's text and reduces the complexity of the narrative, but the overly loose structure and the deliberately sought "break" and "distance" between the film elements make ordinary fans feel lackluster. The novelty brought about by the confusion of time and space is soon exhausted under the love entanglement between the male and female protagonists, turning into a discarded chicken rib and turning into a gimmick. In addition, Georg used a third-person narration approach to textual translations of novels and films.
The large narration narrative, revealing the inner hearts of the characters, while being responsible for interpreting the subtext, and sometimes even advancing the plot, is a debatable narrative method. Although it opens up the psychological distance between the audience and the characters, maintains neutrality, and avoids the rational collapse brought about by empathy with a bystander attitude, providing space for the audience to better think about the core of the film, the cold narration dilutes the concentration of the story, minimizes the dramatic conflict, affects the perception of the film, and makes people feel "out of the play". The narrator almost completely deconstructs the existence of the subtext, depriving the character of the inner world that needs to be hidden, and completely losing the curiosity and emotional resonance that the dialogue needs to provide.
This kind of speaking of the lines, the act of the actors performing, the parallel approach, bold and rebellious, although novel, will certainly attract the discomfort of a large audience, as well as the disdain of traditional filmmakers. Transit is a challenging and meaningful art film that invites audiences to follow the characters in making a connection between the original novel and the rise of contemporary neo-Nazism and anti-refugee sentiment. The social problems of decades ago are still not obsolete. It's just that today we generally suffer from amnesia, or choose to be silent for self-preservation. But the ending must be that everyone is a victim, just like the reunion in the restaurant, the narrator interprets that the onlookers are full of jealousy, the male and female protagonists hug each other affectionately, but in the end they still can't withstand the tricks of fate, and the torture of conscience is doomed to part ways, yin and yang.