"Transit"

I think this film might have been in a past Film Festival, but I didn't see it then.  Flashier titles or bad timing, I suppose.  Anyway, it's available to me now, and I do like those suspense, war-time films.  I was under the impression that it was the story of German dissidents escaping before or at the beginning of World War II, and the very first scenes did have that look.  The guy is in that '30s/'40s collared shirt and plain jacket, they sneak onto a train, he uses some kind of clunky looking morphine shots to calm his friend's pain after an apparent leg amputation.  But, when they reach their destination the police searching the train are on very modern uniforms.  The cars are modern cars.  The riot cops are also wearing perfectly modern gear.  Most people are also dressed in modern fashions, with just a few in sort of retro styles.  Some of the people in this French port city are from North African or Middle Eastern backgrounds, another modern touch.  The poor guy ends up impersonating a writer whose documents he stole from a hotel just so he can get a transit visa to the US, which will allow him to go to Mexico.  He falls for this writer's estranged wife, who is trying to reunite with him before leaving the country, and who has failed to leave at least once when she had the chance.  The impersonator manages to get another visa for her, as his supposed wife, but he gives his ticket to a doctor who is also on his way to Mexico, out of guilt perhaps.  The next day he sees the woman come in and out of the café he's sitting around miserably in, and he rushes to the port to make sure she didn't jump ship again.  The agent assures him she was on the manifest, so on the ship - but the ship hit a mine and went down with no survivors.  The fascists are about to take the city, and while he could conceivably hike across the Pyrenees, he decides to just wait to see his "wife" again.

I wasn't sure if the modern setting was deliberate or not.  Like, the director was trying to make a connection between the refugees of the 1930s and '40s and those of today.  The movie is based on a novel from 1944, so the original story was certainly more focused on one time frame.  It seems the director had originally thought to make a period piece, but when he was scouting out Marseille he decided that the atmosphere of the modern city would add something necessary to the story he was trying to tell.  Sadly, refugees have a timeless story.