The Counterfeiters’ worth seeing but no walk in the park

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

By Henry Sweets

Whoever promoted “The Counterfeiters” in the United States must have known the Holocaust is a tough sell, because their film is marketed as an action/adventure/romance feature instead of a philosophical nail-biter set in a concentration camp.

The American poster features two images: a lady-in-white on a Monte-Carlo beach and a tetchy-looking guy with a magnifying glass. A smaller image of a black gun is conveniently tucked into the top, left corner of the poster as the only sign of death.
Misleading, indeed, as the movie is based on the true story of a Nazi counterfeiting ring conducted by concentration camp prisoners.

The main character, Solomon Sorowitsch, known as Sally, is introduced to us in a misty blue beach scene. Sally checks into a hotel with an unwieldy amount of cash, begins to gamble and meets a French woman. But their romance is cut short when the woman sees a tattoo revealing he was once in a concentration camp. She leaves, with at least some tender regret, and the movie fades back to the early days of the war, when Sally is arrested for counterfeiting the dollar bill and sent off to a concentration camp.

In his first five years of concentration camps, Sally’s self-preserving criminal mind is able to carve out a well-fed existence by painting portraits of Nazi leaders. He is eventually re-located to Sachsenhausen and “Operation Bernhard,” where he is the only real criminal mind in what is known as the largest counterfeiting operation of all time.
The artists, engravers and printers housed in Bernhard’s unit enjoy full meals, showers and toilets, while their brethren are tortured and shot on the other side of the fence. Their oasis of near dignity, and the well-fed existence they get for helping the Nazi’s, are almost counterfeit in themselves. Some of the prisoners want to do their best work to save their lives, while others see that as betraying their own people and want to sabotage the operation.

The greatest moral test for the viewer is that when the horror creeps in to their oasis of near-dignity, the viewer naturally wants to return to imagery of clean sheets and full bowls of soup instead of the bloody, starved scene outside its thin fence.
The poster that doesn’t even show one gray stripe ironically plays in to the central question of the film - how far will we go to shield our selves from the depths of human horror?

Sally’s self preservation eventually dissolves into an honor that transcend both his idealistic counterparts and the Nazi regime.

Filmgoers beware of harrowing imagery, and endless tension, but the introspective reward makes it worth going to see.

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The Counterfeiters’ worth seeing but no walk in the park | Planet JH News Article: Movie Reviews

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