Author: Max Weidman
The Austrian/German film The Counterfeiters just took the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Having grossed just over $1 million in the US, it remains somewhat low-profile. One might assume this is because the premise seems a rather familiar, even hackneyed, one: A Jewish man in Berlin is sent to a concentration camp, suffers through the war and, when released, tries to piece his life back together. In reality, there is little of the familiar about this movie.
The crux of the story, based on historical events, revolves around a secret Nazi plan called Operation Bernhard, a massive counterfeiting enterprise designed to flood the British economy and cripple the war effort of the Allies. The central character, Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), survives by virtue of his extraordinary forgery skills, which land him in a supervisory role of the Operation. In short, this is a very different Holocaust movie.
The film opens with Sally in 1936 Berlin, working on breaking the American dollar and suffering anti-Semitic slights. He’s arrested by a man named Herzog (Devid Striesow, who won a German Film award for Best Supporting Actor), who will factor later as the head honcho when Sally gets moved to his second camp, Sachsenhausen. Before this, Sally manages to survive Mauthausen by drawing flattering portraits of the SS men.
The film is largely an exploration of Sally’s relationship with his art. Immediately before he’s arrested, as he draws the portrait of the woman in his bed, he says it’s easier to earn money by making money than by making art. When he perfects the dollar, Herzog tells him-rather bittersweetly- that it is his masterpiece. With the horrific backdrop of the Third Reich, director Stefan Ruzowitzky weaves a tale about survival and one man’s struggle with his art, authenticity and what it means to print.
The translated title does some injustice to the German original, Die Fälscher, a cognate of “false.” The film poses, among others, questions about falsity, the correspondence of appearance with reality and the currency of symbols. Some crucial moments include: Sally’s ideologue collotyper Burger (August Diehl) talking about how he and his wife used to print anti-Nazi fliers-the “truth”-before their capture; upon being shown the set-up for Operation Bernhard, a man mentions that seeing a printing press reminds you you’re a human; when the SS men flee, the camp and the Jews take over; the coddled and well-dressed men from Operation Bernhard proffer their tattooed forearms to prove they are Jews.
As far as production is concerned, the film is studied, steady, concise (98 minutes) and terribly beautiful. Color is a poignant narrative and material concern; most of the film’s shots are a saturated grey. When Sally-in a sickly white light-slices open his pinky to rouge a man’s cheeks whose TB must be kept a secret from the SS men, one gathers the imminent loss of color as a double threat.
The monochromatic atmosphere does not draw attention to itself, as with Polanski’s The Pianist. Much of the dismal realities, like the not-so-lucky men of Sachsenhausen who walk in circles “testing shoes,” are kept audible but out of sight. This does not mean, however, that The Counterfeiters is for the faint of heart: even with the special treatment afforded them by their skills, the men of the film suffer every kind of insult and injury imaginable. The scenes of bloodshed are tempered by what I take to be a historical and intellectual fascination with what the film’s postscript reminds us was the biggest counterfeiting operation in history.
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