Flicks- Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters, a film by Stefan Ruzowitzky, dramatizes one of the more bizarre episodes of World War III.
by Chris Dashiell- The Film Snob
The Counterfeiters, a film by Stefan Ruzowitzky, dramatizes one of the more bizarre episodes of World War III—Operation Bernhard, a scheme by the Nazis to print counterfeit English and American money in huge amounts, ruining the Allied economy with phony bills while simultaneously helping to finance the strapped German war effort. Like many Nazi ideas, it had more than a touch of insanity, but it achieved some amazing success, luckily too late in the game to affect the outcome.
Salomon Sorowitsch (played by Karl Markovics) is a Russian-Jewish gambler and counterfeiter in Berlin. In 1936 he is arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, where he manages to survive by drawing portraits of German officers. Late in the war, he is transported to another camp where he encounters the man who originally arrested him, an SS officer named Herzog (played by David Striesow). Herzog has been assigned to run the secret counterfeiting operation, and he picks the brilliant Sorowitsch to supervise the other prisoners, all Jews who have been pulled from other camps for their skills, including some survivors of Auschwitz. One of them is Adolf Burger (played by August Diehl), a passionate Communist who tries to persuade Sorowitsch to sabotage the operation in order to hurt the Nazi war effort, but Sorowitsch, while refusing to betray Burger's intentions to the Germans, is focused solely on survival, and on helping his mates live to see the end of the war as well. The love-hate conflict between the dour, determined Sorowitsch and the young firebrand Burger forms the soul of the film, and in fact the book that the film was based on was written by the real-life Adolf Burger.
The director and screenwriter Ruzowitzky has a gritty, no-nonsense style. The picture is at its best depicting the noisy, dirty atmosphere of the concentration camp and its workshop, where everyone is ruled by fear and suspicion. There's also a sense of guilt, since the counterfeiters live in a privileged environment compared to the inmates in the rest of the camp. The central question is: what kind of compromises will you make in order to survive? It's to the film's credit that there is never a clear answer—we are simply presented with this terrifying dilemma on an intense, visceral level.
The movie's greatest asset is Karl Markovics in the central role of the master counterfeiter Sorowitsch. Markovics' thin face, heavy-lidded eyes, and furtive movement perfectly convey the wily criminal's personality, yet there's a submerged strength as well, the sense of indomitable will power that will do anything to keep him and his friends alive, as well as a sense of pride in the excellence of his work. It's a fine performance that makes the picture come alive.
The Counterfeiters won this year's Academy Award for Foreign Language Film.
Chris (the Film Snob) produces the weekly mini-program "Flicks" exclusively for 91.3FM KXCI. Tune in Mondays at 8:00PM and Fridays at 10:00AM and 3:00PM. For more writings from the Film Snob visit www.cinecene.com
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