thecelebritycafe: Movie Review - The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher)

Original Article

Last year's foreign Oscar winner offers a different take on the Holocaust.

Sometimes, it feels like the film industry has already told every story about the atrocities of the Holocaust there is to tell. The only way to still pulling it off is finding a small story inside all of the big history and tell it – and that is exactly what the 2008 foreign-language Academy Award winner The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) does.

Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a master counterfeiter – and he is living the sweetest life it can buy him. But then, he gets arrested, and ends up in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. And the Nazis are not about to let his talent of forging currency and documents go to waste. They set up a workshop where they have Sorowitsch and others forge British money, among other things. In exchange, the counterfeiters get a little oasis in the middle of hell: More food, better beds, a life that actually deserves the name, compared to all the other prisoners.

This puts the group in a dilemma in two ways: They want to survive, they want to live, and they know they only will if they obey the Nazis' orders. But on the other hand, they are painfully aware they are financing the war on the Germans' side by providing them with valuable foreign currency. And then, there’s the guilt of hearing the screams from the other side of the camp while lying in their comfortable beds or having a cigarette.

The Counterfeiters was Austria’s first Oscar win for Best Foreign Language Movie, and deservedly so. It features a number of strong performances, especially by lead Karl Markovics, who is one of the country’s most promising acting talents. The visuals are far from glossy, and seem impressively rough and realistic.

The story suffers from a few lengthy sections and the rather unrealistic portrayal of Adolf Burger, a counterfeiter colleague of Sorowitsch's, from whose point of view the story is told. While all the other characters are realistically torn between doing the “right thing” (resisting the Nazis) and their will to survive, Burger seems to be some kind of angel who always argues for the morally sacrosanct choice, apparently without any fear of being killed for it. One can assume without too much speculation that he made himself look a bit better on purpose, since the movie is based on Burger's own memoirs – and no-one can really blame him for that.