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The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher)
The Counterfeiters is really about one counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, who we first encounter as he checks into a hotel and visits a casino, shortly after the Second World War. Part way through a night of passion, the girl Saloman has picked up at the casino – and the audience – discover a number tattooed onto his arm, and make the realisation that he has been in a concentration camp. The rest of the film is a flashback back to those days, beginning with the night of Sorowitch’s arrest. This framing device is significant, because as Saloman sips champagne pensively alone at a table and thinks back on his time in the camps, it is almost as if this is the first time he has allowed himself to think back and reflect on what has happened to him.
Sorowitsch is different from the other Jews he is incarcerated with in that he is a criminal, arrested for his counterfeiting, but ultimately prized by the Nazis for this ability, as they want to manufacture pound and dollar notes to disrupt the British and US economies. For some in the camps this makes him an object of fear or disdain, for others, an object of admiration. As a career criminal, though, he is focussed one thing: saving his own skin. This brings him into conflict with idealist Adolf Burger (August Diehl, in a memorable performance), who wants to sabotage the counterfeiting programme as a way of getting back at the Nazis.
The tension underpinning this film is not whether Sorowitsch will survive: we know from the beginning that he does. The nail-biting question is how will he survive? Will he sell out his fellow prisoners? Will he collaborate with the amoral Sturmbannführer or will he sabotage the programme? The morality of the film is complicated by the Nazi threats to shoot prisoners unless they start producing results. The film gives us both sides of the question, with some prisoners arguing for survival and others for sacrifice. There are, of course, no easy answers.
On the downside, some of the characterisation doesn’t move beyond the cliché – there is the second in command of the camp who is a simplistic thug, the obvious counterpoint to the treacherously friendly Sturmbannführer; then there is the young Russian student with the cough whom Sorowitsch befriends. At one point, one character receives a letter telling him that his wife has died in Auschwitz – would a concentration camp prisoner really receive letters from Auschwitz? And while thought-provoking, the film lacks any real stylistic flair.
4/5
The Counterfeiters is really about one counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, who we first encounter as he checks into a hotel and visits a casino, shortly after the Second World War. Part way through a night of passion, the girl Saloman has picked up at the casino – and the audience – discover a number tattooed onto his arm, and make the realisation that he has been in a concentration camp. The rest of the film is a flashback back to those days, beginning with the night of Sorowitch’s arrest. This framing device is significant, because as Saloman sips champagne pensively alone at a table and thinks back on his time in the camps, it is almost as if this is the first time he has allowed himself to think back and reflect on what has happened to him.
Sorowitsch is different from the other Jews he is incarcerated with in that he is a criminal, arrested for his counterfeiting, but ultimately prized by the Nazis for this ability, as they want to manufacture pound and dollar notes to disrupt the British and US economies. For some in the camps this makes him an object of fear or disdain, for others, an object of admiration. As a career criminal, though, he is focussed one thing: saving his own skin. This brings him into conflict with idealist Adolf Burger (August Diehl, in a memorable performance), who wants to sabotage the counterfeiting programme as a way of getting back at the Nazis.
The tension underpinning this film is not whether Sorowitsch will survive: we know from the beginning that he does. The nail-biting question is how will he survive? Will he sell out his fellow prisoners? Will he collaborate with the amoral Sturmbannführer or will he sabotage the programme? The morality of the film is complicated by the Nazi threats to shoot prisoners unless they start producing results. The film gives us both sides of the question, with some prisoners arguing for survival and others for sacrifice. There are, of course, no easy answers.
On the downside, some of the characterisation doesn’t move beyond the cliché – there is the second in command of the camp who is a simplistic thug, the obvious counterpoint to the treacherously friendly Sturmbannführer; then there is the young Russian student with the cough whom Sorowitsch befriends. At one point, one character receives a letter telling him that his wife has died in Auschwitz – would a concentration camp prisoner really receive letters from Auschwitz? And while thought-provoking, the film lacks any real stylistic flair.
4/5