Fake it to the limit: Karl Markovics and
Dolores Chaplin (Charlie’s granddaughter) in the Monte Carlo framing
scenes for The Counterfeiters.
Ruzowitzky’s script is based on Adolf Burger’s book The Devil’s Workshop,
culled from his actual memories of the top-secret scam during his
imprisonment at the Sachsenhausen camp. Burger, however, winds up as a
key supporting role (played by August Diehl) and also functions as a
quasi-Jiminy Cricket conscience-raiser (much like Ben Kingsley’s Jewish
accountant in Schindler’s List) in concert with the film’s
central figure, Russian-Jewish expert forger Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch
(Karl Markovics), a composite character derived from an actual
copycatter named Smolianoff.
Markovics’ carefully nuanced performance
highlights Sorowitsch’s many complexities in a film punctuated with
shades of moral ambiguity. Burger continually attempts to sabotage the
forgery process in order to allow the Allied forces more time to emerge
victorious, yet Sally also knows that when a perfect copy of the buck
is created, the counterfeiters’ work is done and they’ll be sent to a
gas chamber. Sorowitsch likewise seems like a composite of memorable
war-movie characters: He’s an absolute perfectionist a la Alec
Guinness’ stiff-upper-lip colonel in The Bridge on the River Kwai
yet when he delivers lines like “I’d rather be gassed tomorrow than
shot for nothing today,” Sally comes across as a nihilistic antihero
similar to William Holden’s POW from Stalag 17.
The early flashbacks, however, seem to take their cue from Leonardo DiCaprio’s real-life con man in Catch Me If You Can
(2002) Sorowitsch, “the most charming scoundrel in {1936) Berlin,”
enjoys the high life of crime’s rewards (“Why earn money by making art?
Earning money by making money is far easier.”), until he dallies with a
dolly too long one evening and gets pinched by German copper Herzog
(Devid Striesow), who as a Nazi commandant would eventually “recruit”
Sorowitsch for the forgery plot.
Markovics always stresses the
intricacies of Sorowitsch’s survival instincts, both in his dialogue
(“I won’t give the Nazis the pleasure of being ashamed I’m still
alive!”) and his furtive bids to placate Herzog’s demands and keep his
co-workers out of harm’s way. Amid a film rife with bizarre
juxtapositions (the counterfeiters are sequestered in a barracks with
hot food and a ping-pong table, while the rest of the camp continues
with its systematic eradication of its inmates) is the nutty irony that
Sorowitsch, who wears on his clothes a green triangle denoting a
habitual criminal, is treated by some fellow prisoners with more
disdain than their Nazi captors.
And while the conclusions of some
character arcs are expected, notably what will happen between the
thuggish Nazi Holst (Martin Brambach) and a consumptive kid nicknamed
Karloff by the goosesteppers, there are also dollops of dark humor
uttered by the prisoners (“Why isn’t God in Auschwitz? He didn’t get
through the selection process!”) and a demented dab of domestic bliss
when Sorowitsch visits Herzog’s happy family (“I don’t hit my children.
. . ”). Ruzowitzky’s socko thriller, the deserved winner for Best
Foreign Language Film during the recent Academy Awards, is a compelling
must-see.
—Bill DeLapp
