THE COUNTERFEITERS (Die Falscher)

Sony Pictures Classics
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-
Directed by: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Written By: Stefan Ruzowitzky, from Adolf Burger’s “The Devil’s Workshop”
Cast: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Martin Brambach, Dolores, Chaplin, August Zirner, Marie Baumer, Velt Stuebner, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Andreas Schmidt
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 1/23/08
Opens: February 22, 2008

Some critics and regular audience members alike have questioned the multiplicity of Holocaust films. “Isn’t it time the studios put a moratorium on the subject?” Or, “Haven’t we beaten this dead horse enough?” Granted: the Holocaust is not a pleasant topic, nor, in my opinion, does George Santayana’s aphorism that in effect states that we must learn from the past in order to avoid repeating its mistakes have much validity. (There have been no small number of holocausts since 1945 despite the world’s knowledge of the Nazi horror.) Nonetheless, when a director and screenwriter treat the subject with originality that makes the film stand out from the crowd, they have every right to let us in on their art.

In that regard, “The Counterfeiters,” which is Austria’s entry into the Oscar competition for films that opened in 2007 and, in fact, has been blessed by the Academy with a nomination, is not wholly original. Die Falscher, as the picture is called in the German language, can be compared to “Schindler’s List,” a mighty tough act to follow given its direction in 1993 by Steven Spielberg with Liam Neeson as the title character, Ben Kingsley as a concentration camp inmate, and seven Oscars on the desks of its cast and crew. Both films are based on true stories, though Schindler is without question a hero, one who starts out as a businessman interested solely in profit who exploits Jewish prisoners in his factory but ends up dedicated to saving 1100 lives, while the commandant of the brutal Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about thirty-five kilometers from Berlin, did save some Jewish lives by his action but only to further his own career as Heinrich Himmler’s subordinate.

“The Counterfeiters” involves a moral question that pits a pragmatist against an idealist; a survivor against a martyr, asking the question: to what extent should an individual prostitute himself to save his life. Should an individual lay down his life rather than obey the commands of a high Nazi official with the absolute power of life and death if such obedience could result in the destabilization of an entire country’s financial system and aid the enemy’s war machine? Stefan Ruzowitzky, the Vienna-born writer-director known to horror fans for “Anatomy”—in which a brilliant med student played by Franka Potente is pitched into a conspiracy at Heidelberg University, where a secret fraternity of medical deviates practice dissection on living subjects—lets us in the audience ponder the question, though his principal character walks the pragmatic road.

The film opens post-World War II in Monte Carlo on a thin, shady-looking Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) bearing a suitcase full of crisp fifties and hundreds, then flashes back to his arrest in Berlin in 1936 by Inspector Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow). After spending five years in Mauthausen concentration camp where he enjoys favors, such as they are, as a sketch artist, he is transferred to Sachsenhausen camp—brutal to most Jewish prisoners but a favored place for a select number of Jews who work under the very same police inspector Herzog now promoted as commandant. Sorowitsch is to head up a group of counterfeiters, forging passports, ID cards, and most of all English pounds and ultimately American dollars to destabilize the currencies of the two unconquered enemy countries and to enable Germany to buy goods, perhaps via Switzerland, though the intermediary is not mentioned. While the favored crew in the camp know that their lives depend on printing the counterfeits, one specialist, Adolf Burger (August Diehl)—the author of “The Devil’s Workshop” from which this film is adapted—is an idealist. He wants to delay, delay and delay, even to revolt violently rather than cave in to the Nazi masters. His idealism is vehemently opposed by the pragmatic Sorowitsch and by the others in the camp.

Benedict Neuenfels’s camera using somewhat desaturated colors amid an obviously needed shabby production design of the counterfeiting facilities within the camp signals that director Ruzowitzky has distanced himself from the commercialism of “Anatomy” and even from his more serious 1998 film “The Inheritors”—about a landowner’s willing his assets to his seven lowly peasant who worked his farm. The ping-pong game between Sorowitsch and Burger is allegorical: the real game is between the survivalist and the dreamer; the pragmatist and the idealist; or if you prefer, the amoral and the ideologue. At no time, however, are the ideas separate from the people. This is a human drama all the way, not a lesson in philosophy or its branch, ethics. Violence is a given; it is random, it can arise at any time from an German officer, from a kapo, from an ordinary prisoner, ultimately from one of the starved inmates on the other side of the wall confronting one of the favored within the counterfeiting operation.

“The Counterfeiters” may not quite be “Schindlers’ List.” Perhaps the actors are not as polished. Certainly they are not as well known to most of the world as Spielberg’s people, and Ruzowitzky’s picture appears fifteen years after that director’s great work. Yet this is a must-see film--not because knowing about what went on during those tragic years will prevent future Holocausts. We know from experience that this argument is specious. In fact as the press notes states, twenty percent of Austrians today, in 2008, vote for two right-wing political parties with an ideology similar to that of the Nazis. This film commands our attention because every moment is riveting, given a team of actors who throw themselves into the period with ferocity, motivating the audience to do further research, possibly on the Internet, for more information about the actual events that took place.

Not Rated. 98 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online