THE COUNTERFEITERS [R]
review by Robert Newton

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film is a curiosity of sorts; it is a Holocaust drama, yet its protagonist is an antihero. Soon after meeting Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (a captivating Karl Markovics), we realize that he is an opportunistic forger whose dubious skills and penchant for partying landed him in a concentration camp in 1936. A slightly abrupt flash-forward to the back side of the war has Sally tapped to create flawless copies of the pound and the dollar with which his Nazi captors will flood the British and American economies while funding a faltering Third Reich’s own war effort.

While the unconventional story waltzes occasionally with melodrama, it succeeds in becoming a survivor’s tale of an entirely different sort. Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, taking a bold step up from the derivative genre fare of his Anatomy series, succeeds greatly in depicting Sally’s shift in priorities and how the tenets of traditional heroism warp when death becomes a daily reality. He also does a fantastic job in creating an eerie oasis for Sally and his prized cohorts; they eat and live well, with a third act climax literally breaking down the wall between them and the rest of the prisoners, who nearly mistake Sally and his well-fed crew for regular folk. Making the film — and making it so seemingly neutral — was a bold move on Ruzowitzky’s part, in that his family had in it Nazi sympathizers that might have otherwise tainted the presentation. While the take on the story may not be fresh, the story itself of Operation Bernhardt’s role in the war and in the lives of the men behind it certainly is.

The special features go well beyond the standard. A 10-minute making-of featurette is a bit dry (though most anything is when narrated in German), though the 18 minutes of interviews with Ruzowitzky, real-life counterfeiter Adolf Burger (on whose memoirs the film is based) and actor Markovics add some nice dimension, as does 13 minutes of excerpts from the Q&A with Ruzowitzky from last year’s AFI Fest. Four deleted scenes are of minor interest, though the most fascinating feature here is Burger’s own personal testimony in which he details life in the camp and addresses the Holocaust deniers who would reduce the 13 million dead to a scattering of unsupervised bad eggs who roughed up some prisoners.