'Counterfeiters' actually is the genuine article

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

March 28, 2008

(A) The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion The Bridge on the River Kwai of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.

When we first meet the anti-hero, Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), it's in 1936 Berlin, and he's merely the world's best counterfeiter. But when, in 1944, he enters an incongruously cushy corner of the Sachsenhausen camp, he gets the chance to achieve a goal he never mastered on the outside: Creating a perfect copy of the U.S. dollar bill. It's his version of Alec Guinness' Colonel Nicholson's building his magnificent bridge while ensconced in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp of David Lean's celebrated war epic.

As the key component of the Third Reich's massive late-war forging mission, Operation Bern- hard, Sally uses his savvy and his clout to manipulate Herzog (David Striesow), the German officer in charge. Herzog is a self-styled savior of the Jews as well as a managerial people person: He talks about being "a motivator" in the manner of today's corporate-leadership gurus.

Herzog's elite inmates do savor their fine, soft beds. But even when classical music drowns out the cries of the general Sachsenhausen population, the Jews never forget who they are and where they are. Sally mostly saves - from the Nazis, and from themselves - the diverse graphic designers, photographers, artists and printers in his group, including the rigidly idealistic Burger (August Diehl). Yet he supervises the forgeries so well that his efforts threaten to give Hitler a second financial wind and catalyze a new phase of World War II.

The Counterfeiters is more than the tale of a craftsman's pride threatening to overtake his ethics. On the outside, even at their peak, Sally's ethics rose only to the concept of "honor among thieves"; they rested on his exacting swift payment (sometimes brutally) for prized goods and services.

The movie is really about the value, and the danger, of improvising one's existence day by day. Within the horrid, perverse confines of a concentration camp, this master crook's furtive observation, elasticity and cunning are far more essential than Burger's holy bluster. Sally can understand what drives Herzog's behavior: He dares to imagine his way into Herzog's jackboots while Burger won't let his thoughts go there. But with a quick hand-motion to the heart, Burger reminds Sally of the humane qualities that make survival worth the effort.

The superb Austrian writer-director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, uses the tango as a musical motif - a reminder of Sally's last night of freedom, spent forging an Argentine passport for a voluptuous Jewish activist escaping Germany for the land of tangos. The original artwork scattered around his digs, including his sketch of her nude body, seduced her; so did his dancing. But the whole movie becomes a tango between Sally's pragmatism and Burger's purity, with Herzog calling the tune. It's enthralling in its movements, bracing in its toughness. Ruzowitzky insists his characters stay true to themselves, even when they change their surface behavior. The results are cathartic.

Markovics' weathered, wiry Sally would look at home in a gritty film noir like John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, and the description of crime in that movie - "a left-handed form of human endeavor" - fits his characterization to a T, or a drafter's T-square. It's tempting to call Sally the counterfeiter as artist, but he's frustrated as a painter, too, as he himself dismisses a suggestion that he could be a great artist. He survives his first concentration camp by painting flattering portraits of his captors and creating heroic poster art of proper Aryans. He fashions hack art to survive, and for all its notoriety, his highpoints of counterfeiting are a form of hackwork, too.

As the inspired Markovics plays Sally, the man knows he's the hack of hacks, the king of knock-offs, yet his honest self-estimation imbues him with an ornery, enduring strength. Markovics as Sally has the recessive slouch and quiet intensity of a man who doesn't need attention and acclaim and even shrugs it off, as well as the saturnine confidence of a fellow who can list his own strengths and shortcomings. Markovics reserves his forcefulness for moments that count, whether Sally is bargaining with Herzog or forcing a tubercular art student from Odessa to eat his dinner, urging him to swallow each spoonful for an art movement - "One for the expressionists, one for the avant-garde" he starts. "Eat or I'll flatten you," he adds, helpfully.

Sally's lone-wolf jailbird persona doesn't simply enable him to maneuver in the jungle of the camps - it also keeps him primed to sources of renewal and vitality within his crew, even if they emanate from a straight arrow like Burger. And that keeps The Counterfeiters from being a one-man show. Sally has a survivor's sensitivity as well as a survivor's killer instincts. He tries to help the self-destructors who can be helped, such as Burger; he is sympathetic to those who may not make it, such as the father who finds pictures of his children in a pile of dead people's documents from Auschwitz. Yet Ruzowitzky doesn't sentimentalize his anti-hero or restrict his drama to the sanitized limits of Operation Bernhard.

In a series of stark and jolting climactic moments, Sally leaves the confines of his counterfeiting group with a corpse in his arm, not knowing the appropriate spot to place a dead man in a concentration camp. Moments like this turn The Counterfeiters into the real thing - a work of entertainment that's also an honest-to-God work of art.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com