Christian Petzold struck that the Berlinale audience in the current and intense story of empathy for refugees of all times and places

(Luigi Noera from Berlin in collaboration with Marina fearful – Photos are published courtesy of the Berlinale)

Presented in competition at 68Th edition of the Berlin Festival, Transit It is the latest film by German director Christian Petzold.

The story here staging is a story from the universal breath, set in France, to be exact - during the German occupation - but with location and contemporary costumes. The timeless story of a man, Georg, who finds himself in Marseille with objects belonging to the writer just committed suicide, including letters, Will and old photographs and which soon will assume the identity. Once in town, the man will be able to meet the family of his friend - which includes a deaf-mute woman and her eight-year-old son - and the wife of the deceased - who has never stopped looking for her husband. Among countless bureaucratic procedures to obtain permission to leave France and head to Mexico and an uninterrupted search for identity, born new loves and important affections with one of the greatest tragedies of humanity in the background.

We agree: a country like Germany has time and again made "mea culpa", cinematically speaking,with regard to the ascent of Hitler to power first and then burnt. Just think of the high percentage of German and Austrian titles covering the subject. And Petzold himself has already had occasion to consider the thing, giving in 2013 a film like The secret of his face (un'intensa with Nina Hoss), dove, also in this case, the lost identity theme was the base of all the feature. It's just a few years later, But, that the German author manages to stand out so-called quantum leap - with Transit, in fact - creating something much more complex and layered, in which the themes of Nazism, the search for identity and immigration merge into each other in a natural way. The end result is, probably, one of the most mature works of Petzold, who is not afraid to dare and to detach from reality and told where the characters and the relationships between them are born we seem so ephemeral as intense. Reports that, in a transit city (also in this regard, It never has been more appropriate title) as Marseille are born and die overnight, but that, one way or another, here they are meant to change those lives he has involved himself. Very delicate and intense, eg, the friendship that develops between Georg and the son of his friend: a sort of surrogate father-son relationship that could influence the decision of the protagonist or not to leave the city. But things, obviously, They are not so simple. We can not know, eg, all the background of the characters, which is deliberately barely sketched. What matters it is how they are in the very moment when we see them on the screen, in this phase of transit in which the fates of each seem to change suddenly from one moment to another.

There is only one person, observing with due detachment presented to the human comedy, He tells us, with doing a novelist, the story of our hero, according to further enrich an already work itself wonderfully trasbordante, who, your back, He goes so far as to create a phantasmagoric dimension perfectly embedded in the context.

For a feature film like this can be blamed Petzold, perhaps, only succession too fast - as you get closer to the end - of the many joints narrative present in script. But, undoubtedly, that's part of the game. And we can not help but be led by the hand through the narrow streets of this so cosmopolitan Marseille, so charming and so mysterious as that raccontataci in this evocative timeless story.

marina fears