The Counterfeiters (2007)

Posted by fetchblog

June 17, 2008

The film opens with a gaunt and tight-lipped Scully (Karl Markovics), wearing an ill-fitting suit with seams showing, approaching the front desk of a marbled Monte Carlo hotel lobby. He has no problem getting a room; inside his one piece of luggage, a leather brief case, is loads of loot, and in 1945, money not only talks but sets the terms.

Flashback to Germany 1936: he holds court in a smoky nightclub. One of his lackeys describes him, with no small amount of admiration, as “the most charming scoundrel in Berlin.” Booze, fake passports, he provides it all. And the customer always comes first: when one blond fräulein shoots him a withering look upon finding out his real name, he doesn’t bat an eye. His motto: one adapts or dies, which he lives out to the fullest after the police bust his counterfeit money and passport ring.

The year 1939 finds him with a sledgehammer in the rock quarry at Mauthausen concentration camp. Briefly, the film’s cinematography turns an icy gray, the recent palette of choice for Holocaust films. And it’s only here that writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky shortchanges Sally’s survival skills. This work detail was virtually a death sentence; to survive at all was an achievement.

Hard-edged and less spectral colors return, just when Sally’s moral ground turns grey; he’s transferred to Sachsenhausen in 1944, becoming part of an effort to create counterfeit sterling in Hitler’s bizarre scheme to flood and destroy the British economy and possibly finance Germany’s war machine. His draftsmen skills have kept him alive so far, put to use by the SS. Now, he’s given new clothes, secondhand actually – the previous owner has been deported to Auschwitz – and assigned to a group of craftsmen, all Jewish, including communist Adolf Burger (August Diehl). The real-life Burger, now in his nineties, wrote the memoir that is the basis for the film.

All the men live in spotless barracks removed from the rest of the inmates. In the workshop, a yearning Bel Canto aria plays in the background as Sally retouches the counterfeit pound notes and supervises the other men. By aiding the Nazi war machine and prolonging the Nazi regime, they’re kept alive. If they fail, they die, and they know it.