This German film was highly regarded enough to be placed on the top of multiple critics’ best of lists but I find it to be mostly a missed opportunity. The script, the acting and the themes it invokes are all great but the setting is just all wrong and the visuals don’t at all match what is supposedly happening. It turns out that this was an adaptation of a novel set during the Second World War but the director Christian Petzold transposed it to the present day. I presume that this was due to budgetary reasons because it was dreadfully done and really harms the overall quality of the film.

In Paris, Georg is one of many refugees who are desperate to flee France as a fascist invading army advances. A friend offers him money to deliver some letters to a well known writer Weidel but he discovers that the man has already committed suicide. He collects the dead writer’s last manuscript and documents and travels to Marseille with another friend who dies on route. Seeing that Weidel has been promised safe harbor in Mexico, he tries returning the documents to the Mexican consulate but is mistaken for being Weidel himself. He decides to go along with the charade in exchange for money and passage out of France. Meanwhile he also befriends the son of his dead friend and keeps running into a mysterious woman who seems to think that he is someone else.

This is a confusing film to make sense of. We’re introduced to Georg but we know nothing about his background. We can see that this is present day France and it is seemingly being invaded but we don’t know why or by who really, save for when a hotel receptionist, seeing that Georg is German thinks he is one of the invaders. Georg has friends and contacts who seem to be artistic types but we don’t know who they are either or why they’re trying to run away. We’re left wondering if this is a metaphor for something or a science-fiction scenario of some sort. Everything becomes much more clear when you realize that this story was supposed to be set during the Second World War and Georg and his contacts are probably Jewish refugees. That’s why it’s so maddening that all of this has been left out of this adaptation. Nothing in the story makes sense outside of this context! This lazy transposition is so half-hearted that it’s distracting. We can see that it’s set in the present day yet somehow the authorities rely on paper visas and identification documents and people talk about fleeing on ships or even hiking across the mountain instead of taking planes. People also have a hard time getting in touch with one another and rely on letters and leaving messages with other people because of course they don’t have mobile phones. At this point, it would be better if they just filmed it on a stage so that everyone knows that we’re supposed to pretend that it’s the Second World War.

All that is a real shame as the underlying themes are fine. The original intent is clearly to paint a picture of a setting in which everyone is increasingly desperate to flee. There are promising scenes such as when the residents of the cheap hotel Georg holes up in refuse to meet one another’s eyes when the police arrives to drag one of them away. The way that the same people keep running into each other, in the street or in halls of the consulate to beg for visas, is too on the nose but serves to reinforce the sense that this is a closed circle. The sudden romance between Georg and the mysterious woman feels unearned and less interesting to me, plus it’s easy to guess who she really is, but I suppose it’s entertaining enough. But all this means nothing as the production values don’t match what the film is trying to convey. The world doesn’t feel oppressive even though the characters behave as if it is and the threat of violence on the horizon feels unreal when we can see for ourselves that this is just an ordinary French city in which life goes on as usual.

That’s why this film is a disappointment. This needed to be either be returned to its original Second World War in which it was conceived or properly transposed to the present day with proper worldbuilding and the appropriate changes. They also needed more of a budget so they don’t have to keep filming different scenes in the exact same seating in the exact same restaurant or just go full tilt in the opposite direction towards surreality. As it exists, this film is a messy compromise and that makes it easily skippable.