NP - "Transit" Movie

[David Morris]

I think this review is inaccurate:
"The past and present are a terrifying blur in “Transit,” a brilliant
allegory set [It starts, not set there] in [Paris] France that opens amid
wailing police sirens."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html?referrer=google_kp

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I think the WP review is more accurate:

The movie “Transit” opens at a cafe in Paris as a police siren wails
outside. The conversation — between two men at a bar making arrangements
for transportation — is furtive: “Paris is being sealed off,” one whispers,
before handing over letters for his companion, Georg, to deliver to a third
man. Soon after, Georg encounters the man from the bar again on the street,
only this time his companion has been detained, along with several other
pedestrians, by police in riot gear. When one of the cops asks Georg for
his “papers,” Georg socks him in the jaw and makes a run for it.

The year is — well, what year is it, exactly? Although the police vehicles
are modern, along with everything else in the film, the setting, based on
circumstantial evidence, seems to be Nazi-occupied France during World War
II. Georg (played by Joaquin Phoenix look-alike Franz Rogowski), a German
Jew, is on the run, it would appear. But is this the past or the present?
At first glance, “Transit” plays like some surrealistic vision of a
dystopian near-future, in which the Holocaust has repeated itself, to the
letter, but minus swastikas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/transit-is-a-holocaust-movie-set-in-the-present-and-the-gimmick-is-surprisingly-effective/2019/03/05/c96fb860-3b96-11e9-aaae-69364b2ed137_story.html

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This movie's structure is ALL about narrative control about what the viewer
can perceive. It tells a moving and multi-layered story of people fleeing
the "Cleansing" of the advancing German occupation of France.  But ALL of
the setting is modern day, including the riot gear of the invaders. Fleeing
France is the overwhelming goal of a huge number of "illegals."

There's a bit of Murder Mystery construct of the unfolding story, but there
is an arch narrator who is at first thought to be the main character as if
reading his 3rd person memoir (not so). And that main character is using
the papers of, and impersonating, a famous (newly dead) writer to flee to
Mexico.

Nicely done.
David Morris