Big Picture Big Sound

Currency Events

We first meet Salomon Sorowitsch, a gaunt, stubbly man on a beach in Monte Carlo, staring out at the sea. Newspaper headlines tell us World War II has just ended. Salomon, or "Sally" as he's known (the wonderfully stone-faced Karl Markovics), walks into a fancy hotel wearing a tattered suit, opens his briefcase and, as a deposit, lays down a stack of crisp US fifty dollar bills. No sooner does Sally bed a beautiful casino groupie, than we flashback to Berlin in 1936 where Sally makes a good living creating forgeries of all kinds. Though he is a great artist, he found that he could "make more money by making money". He is, it becomes clear, the best counterfeiter in Germany. Sally is also a Russian Jew. But despite the approaching Nazi threat, Sally is still a cavalier businessman; he believes the Jews are persecuted simply because "they refuse to adapt". When a tryst with a beautiful customer keeps him in Berlin one night too many, Sally is arrest and shipped off to the Mauthausen concentration camp. This is simply the start of "The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher)", the fascinating, unsentimental true story of the man who helped the Nazis perpetrate the largest counterfeiting operation in history.

Ever the opportunist, Sally slyly (more like suicidally) lets it be known that he can draw. He becomes, almost comically, the camp's resident artist, painting portraits of the Nazi commanders and their families. This gets him extra food and slightly better treatment. Five years later, he is transferred to Sachsenhausen by the very man that arrested him in Berlin, Friedrich Herzog (David Striesow, in a fine layered performance). Now Commandant, Herzog has been put in charge of a Nazi effort to bankrupt the British and US economies by flooding them with phony money. Sally is setup to lead an elite group of prisoners who are kept in "the golden cage", a kind of secret barracks within the camp. The "cage" isn't much more than a concentration camp with "fine beds" and a Ping Pong table, but it keeps this small group fed, busy and, for the time being, away from the rest of the camp's atrocities.

Sally's old skills quickly return and he has the camp producing millions of British pounds in no time. The American dollar is a tougher nut to crack, especially when Sally locks horns with idealistic campmate Adolf Burger (August Diehl). Burger refuses to be complicit in effectively funding the Nazi war effort.

Perhaps even more unbelievable than this setup is the fact that "The Counterfeiters" is a true story, based on the memoir written by Adolf Burger himself. The story is given an effective, impressive treatment by a universally fine cast and Austrian-born writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky. Mr. Ruzowitzky previously worked on the Matt LeBlanc/Eddie Izzard cross-dressing misfire "All the Queen's Men" and, perhaps more relevantly, the German "Anatomie" horror films. He uses some techniques from the latter films to create the gritty, oppressive atmosphere of a Nazi concentration camp. He also wisely steers clear of retreading over familiar cinematic Holocaust territory, keeping his focus instead within the walls of the "golden cage". Mr. Ruzowitzky's shaky, handheld technique gives the action a thrilling immediacy and retains the sense of fear and dread inherent in this material. Only an occasionally thudding score reminds us that we're watching a dramatization. "Counterfeiters" needed no such affectations; it has a much more subtly effective soundtrack happening just outside the walls of the "cage" as random gunshots and the screams of the prisoners persist at all hours.

At the core of "Counterfeiters" is one of those impossible moral quandaries. The kind none of us should ever have to face. Do you aid a monstrous enemy to save your own life, or refuse and sacrifice yourself and the lives of your fellow prisoners? The film never chooses sides. Sally is the protagonist, but that is simply by design. There is no right or wrong; moral absolutes shatter in the face of this kind of inhumanity. The question "what would I do in this situation" isn't hammered home; it hovers brutally, implicitly over every scene. Mr. Ruzowitzky's frank, compelling film simply presents the story (the facts, with perhaps a little license) and invites us, dares us, to ask it ourselves.