I haven't read it, but I suspect that Anna Segher's novel for which this movie, "Transit," is based is better than the adaptation. Besides the 1944 book featuring the immediacy of Nazism, WW2 and the Holocaust, the plot tricks here tend be more authorial than cinematic, narrative and not visual. There's the writer-turned-character as the protagonist assumes the identity of the dead author (Take that Barthes and your theory of "the death of the author" in appreciating literature! Oh, am I the only one excited by that?). There's his manuscript, or book-within-the-book. Characters tells stories within the grander dystopian romance, of the hardships they've endured to try to escape or the loved ones they've lost. The entire main plot is told by a marginal character of the framing story serving as narrator. This is strong, reflexive storytelling. The filmmakers don't add much to this, although the motif of looking through windows is aesthetically pleasing.
Partially updating the setting to a mysterious dystopia of approaching "ethnic cleansing," where typewriters, old passports and transit papers coexist with modern streets and fashion seems an odd, if not cheap, choice. It also risks making its "Casablanca" (1942/43) socially irrelevant. Hence, I think, the insertion of the deaf and mute mother and football-loving son, immigrants from the Maghreb. This plotline hints at where in the real world desperation to flee war-torn regions exists today, that people struggle to flee to Europe now, along with North American countries such as the U.S. and Mexico, with their promises of opportunity, peace and tolerance--whether they live up to those ideals is another matter. Problem is, this storyline matters so little that it could be cut from the picture without harming the main thrust. No more important than side characters like the woman with the dogs or the man boring the protagonist with his story about passport photos. The main narrative remains a novelistic "Casablanca" love triangle, and the rest don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Partially updating the setting to a mysterious dystopia of approaching "ethnic cleansing," where typewriters, old passports and transit papers coexist with modern streets and fashion seems an odd, if not cheap, choice. It also risks making its "Casablanca" (1942/43) socially irrelevant. Hence, I think, the insertion of the deaf and mute mother and football-loving son, immigrants from the Maghreb. This plotline hints at where in the real world desperation to flee war-torn regions exists today, that people struggle to flee to Europe now, along with North American countries such as the U.S. and Mexico, with their promises of opportunity, peace and tolerance--whether they live up to those ideals is another matter. Problem is, this storyline matters so little that it could be cut from the picture without harming the main thrust. No more important than side characters like the woman with the dogs or the man boring the protagonist with his story about passport photos. The main narrative remains a novelistic "Casablanca" love triangle, and the rest don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.