Your Number Please

This scene is particularly interesting in the terms of refugees and performance throughout the film.  To start this scene, Georg is playing the role of Weidel, the poet that died at the beginning of the movie.  Throughout the clip we see why it is important for him to play this role if he has any hopes of leaving this port town.  When he mentions the name Weidel he is immediately brought back to see a different man and given transit passes. This shows how corrupt the refugee process was and how one had to have money and know people if they ever wanted to get out.  If he had not known this person he would have been simply categorized and given to the next person to wait in line for like the other characters we see in the waiting rooms throughout the movie.  Another interesting part of this clip is the number that the worker is insisting on.  It is written on a small ripped up piece of paper and he requires to see it before saying anything.  When he does see the number he does nothing with it but throw it in a desk making it seem not important just another way to try and delay the process if people loose their number.

The camera angles in the clip switch pretty rapidly between shots of Georg’s face and the workers face allowing the audience to see everyone’s reactions but also create a tension on if his playing of Weidel is going to do anything for him or if he will be caught impersonating someone else.  This adds to the suspension of this scene both of the performance aspect but also what will come to the refugees and what processes do they have to go through.

Deadly Optimism

In this clip, we see the final interaction between Georg and the woman who was watching the dogs before she kills herself. When watching this clip I thought back to Hannah Arendt’s We Refugees and her discussion about the suicides of the Jewish people. Arendt discusses the optimism and hope that many of the Jewish people had in the hopes of returning home, and how ultimately that optimism and hope faded for many and eventually led them to suicide. The Jewish refugees were left in a state of limbo not knowing if or when they would be able to return home, so the only thing that they had that they could cling to after losing their homes and livelihoods was hope and optimism. However, one hope and optimism is gone, they are left with nothing and death can be seen as a better option. This is similar to the woman with the dogs. The dogs she is tasked with watching symbolize her hope for escape. However, these dogs ultimately die, symbolizing how her hope and optimism of leaving France has died. Mirroring may Jewish and refugees from other countries, the woman ultimately decides to kill herself and simply falls from the ledge where she and Georg are smoking. She kills herself quietly with no explanation just like how Arendt described the suicides of Jewish refugees.