The Counterfeiters
2007, 15, Metrodome
An unsurprising winner of this year's foreign language film Oscar (from which category both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and La Vie En Rose were omitted), this intelligent Austrian drama impressively juggles themes of guilt and survival, heroism and betrayal, against the background of the Holocaust.
Based on the concentration-camp memoirs of Adolf Burger, the grim but gripping tale focuses on the enigmatic figure of Salomon Sorowitsch, a Russian Jew whose forging skills are employed by the Nazis in an attempt to revive their flagging fortunes toward the end of the Second World War (played by Karl Markovics, right, with Nazi captor Devid Striesow).
Consigned to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, Salomon is ordered to forge sterling notes - a near-impossible task - and thereby destabilise the British economy. If he co-operates, he will secure his safety, but aid the German war effort. If he refuses, he and his fellow inmates will lose what few privileges they have - and perhaps even more.
In the accompanying featurettes, the now-90-year-old Adolf Burger declares that he wrote his source book, The Devil's Workshop, in direct response to the rise of neo-Nazism and Holocaust-denial. 'I forged £136m on behalf of the SS,' he tells a class of students, as part of his ongoing mission to keep the terrible events of the war alive in the modern consciousness. This eminently engaging film clearly continues that work, popularising complex issues without simplifying or denigrating them. Crucially, Salomon's motives (unlike Oskar Schindler's, in Spielberg's Oscar winner) remain solidly ambiguous throughout, shifting between the base instinct for survival and the desire for success. Meanwhile, writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky relies on the 'grotesque and bizarre' details of Burger's account (the constant piping of opera music, ping-pong table recreation) to conjure a world of harrowing authenticity.
