AN Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film, “The Counterfeiters” recasts concentration camp internees not as passive victims but as authors of their own moral decisions. If you were among the doomed, would you take another life to extend your own? How about facilitating thousands of other deaths to give yourself one more day on Earth?
Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a Jewish artist who loves to make money – and passports, and certificates of ancestry. In 1936 Berlin, when he isn’t drawing beautiful women, he’s getting rich off a counterfeit operation.
Arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, he starts leaving hero-portraits of his German captors lying around. When they notice his talent, they smile on his work and rescue him from the herd. In return for becoming a sketchpad Riefenstahl, he gets enough food to continue living.
Transferred to a different camp, Sachsenhausen, Salomon senses the end but instead gets sized for a suit. He puts on the new clothes and tries not to think about what happened to the Jew who was forced to give them up.
Salomon’s part of the camp is populated by artists, engravers, printers and photographers: The Germans place him at the head of a counterfeiting workshop, where they hope to manufacture fake British pounds with which to destabilize the British economy. Salomon’s fakes are so good, though, that they fool the Bank of England, and the Germans use them to finance their war machine. A fellow inmate named Burger vows sabotage, even if it costs him his life, deciding that otherwise he might as well be a Nazi.
“I’d rather be gassed tomorrow than be shot for nothing today,” argues Salomon. “A day’s a day.”
The dilemma is an unsettling one, the kind that sparks discussion after the movie, but it’s also somewhat beside the point. Morality is a luxury reserved for those of us who don’t have guns pointed at us. And though Salomon is on-screen virtually throughout, we never quite understand him. A framing device at the beginning and end of the film, in which he wanders through postwar Monte Carlo, doesn’t really get the job done.
Based on the true story of the world’s largest counterfeiting operation, “The Counterfeiters” is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.
THE COUNTERFEITERS
Genuine article.
In German with English subtitles. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R (violence, nudity, profanity, Holocaust atrocities). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika.