Die Fälscher (2007) Reviews

• See this movie.

  antibyte2007-11-23

  I just saw this movie in London last night. There were 5 people in the audience (including myself). What a shame because this was a solid piece of film-making. If you haven't seen The Counterfeiters, go see it. Here's why. The acting is outstanding all the way through. You will learn more about counterfeiting efforts by the Nazis to undermine the British and Americans. This movie has numerous layers to it, and avoids the typical clichés that all Germans acted one way, and all Jews acted another way. You learn the subtle ways that control over other people is used to manipulate them. Do you put aside your beliefs in order to survive? If so, are you being true to those beliefs? Is it better to be a dead, morally right person or a live, less moral one? These are central themes. Finally, does how we make our wealth matter? These aren't ideas unique to cinema, but the way the movie presents them is.

• laughter in the dark

  snow0r2007-10-17

  Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Markovics) is a master counterfeiter, living a life of debauchery in pre-war Berlin, until his luck finally runs out, and he is captured and shipped out to the Mauthausen concentration camp. He witnesses the horrors of camp life; fellow prisoners are beaten, shot, and starved, but Sally, determined to survive, looks out for himself and uses his skills as an artist to secure a more comfortable lifestyle during his incarceration. After taking advantage of his talents, his superiors transfer him to Sachsenhausen, where he is to oversee the largest counterfeiting operation in history. Here, Sally is provided with all the men and equipment he needs to crack the pound and the dollar; his criminal enterprises are now government funded. The price of failure is made clear, but the counterfeiters are also wary of the price of success, as once the currencies have been cracked, they will be surplus to requirements; their lives depend not only on their successes but also their failures. This is where Burger (Diehl), the film's moral centre, comes into play. Unlike Sally, he sees the bigger picture, struggling to come to terms with the fact that while his work keeps him alive, it helps the Nazi war effort. Neither can he reconcile himself with the fact that while he lives in relative comfort other detainees, including his wife and children, live in squalor. These moral dilemmas form the basis of the film, and in the face of the horrors of camp life, Sally tries to shrug them off with De Niro squints and smiles; the maxim that one must look after oneself is one repeated throughout the film. It's a very interesting idea, and it's one that is presented very well, both in terms of style and performance. The camera-work captures the bleak setting effectively, and the lead performances are uniformly excellent, but the use of tango for the score is inspired. The contrast between the music and the images adeptly complement the film's complicated moral tone. There is also a surprising amount of humour; while the bigger picture is indeed bleak, there are moments of comedy, and even if it is laughter in the dark, it is welcome and helps not only to carry the film along but humanise it and its characters. The Counterfeiters is a very enjoyable film, which isn't something that can be said for many World War II "true stories". Its interesting exploration of adaptation and survival under extreme circumstances makes for an engaging story, and one that is definitely worth seeking out.

• Austria's Oscar contender

  Superunknovvn2008-02-10

  This is the rare - and by that I REALLY mean rare! - case of an Austrian movie being able to bear comparison with international competition. "Die Fälscher" is a well-made and touching movie about the Holocaust and a special division of Jews in a concentration camp that survived by counterfeiting money (or pretending to do so) for the Nazis. Karl Markovics is the shining light of the cast. Who thought that the guy who came to greater popularity by starring in "Kommissar Rex" would end up getting roles like this one and playing them to perfection? August Diehl is good, too, but he comes across as a bit too dramatic at times. The Nazis - and that's the only weakness of Stefan Ruzowitzky's movie - are the way they always are. Ruthless, cruel, craven and at the same time stupid pigs who do everything to humiliate the Jews at any time. Even though, that is probably the way 99% of them really were, it would have been more interesting to get a differentiated view on some of them. While "Die Fälscher" may not reinvent the wheel, it is a pretty great movie. And although it's typical that Hollywood would pick only a Holocaust-story from Austria as an Oscar contender, it is exciting as hell for a movie from this country to get a nomination. I really hope that Stefan Ruzowitzky will get the award, because his movie deserves it and it could help the Austrian film industry to finally get momentum again.

• But Is It True?

  johnpetersca2008-03-03

  Most Holocaust narratives involve cruel Nazis and virtuous, victimized Jews. The Counterfeiters is at least a partial exception. The Nazis in the film are certainly cruel, but their cruelty is based on the perverted ideals of their racist ideology and on their need to obey orders or be killed rather than on their being innately evil men. They are capable of decency when it's in their interest. The Jews in the special unit of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp depicted in The Counterfeiters are assembled because of their abilities in such skills as etching, printing, and, in the case of Salomon Sorowitsch, the film's protagonist, counterfeiting. The triangles sewn into their uniforms are a mixture of green (criminal), red (socialist or communist) and, in all cases, yellow (Jewish). Other reviewers have ably described the major theme of The Counterfeiters, the conflict between, as David Denby puts it in the March 3, 2008 New Yorker, the relative heroism of "the morally intransigent man who refuses all compromise with evil, or the trimmer who partly collaborates with an oppressor in the hope of keeping himself and others alive". It may be significant that the German title of the film, Die Fälscher, can refer to falsifiers as well as counterfeiters. Because The Counterfeiters is repeatedly described, by its publicists and others, as a "true story", I want to focus on some of the variations between the post-war interrogation statement given by Salomon Smolianoff, the real-life master counterfeiter portrayed in the film, and the events depicted in the movie. A photocopy of Smolianoff's original interrogation statement can be found on www.lawrencemalkin.com, the website of Lawrence Malkin, the author of Kreuger's Men, an account of counterfeiting operations during World War II. My purpose is not to expose fabrications. Rather, it is to explore variations between life and art and to determine whether, in a particular work, these variations have a pattern that supports a consistent explanation. • The Physical Setting: In the interrogation statement, Smolianoff describes being taken to "a special barrack, which was located in absolute isolation and surrounded by heavy barb-wire." In the movie, there are several occasions on which the relatively privileged participants in the counterfeiting operation are exposed to the screams of regular inmates who are being beaten and killed. Such witnessing would not have been possible with the degree of physical separation described by Smolianoff. • Pounds and Dollars: In Smolianoff's narrative, he is transferred to Sachsenhausen, after counterfeit British pound notes have been successfully produced, in order to work on the more difficult forgery of American dollars. In the movie, Sorowitsch is involved with counterfeiting both pounds and dollars. • The Man in Charge: In real life, the German counterfeiting effort was called Operation Bernhard after Bernhard Krueger, the SS man who headed it. In the movie, a fictional Inspector Herzog arrests Sorowitsch in the mid thirties and, coincidentally, heads the counterfeiting project during the final months of World War II. • Sabotage: In the interrogation statement, Smolianoff describes the decision to sabotage the counterfeiting operation as occurring when the lights go out during an American air raid: We took this occasion to agree between us for the first time to sabotaze (sic) the whole work. We dealt our tasks and agreed that in the future every one of us should complain about the work of the other, in order to gain time, because the situation of the war, promised to us an eventually (sic) escape from everything and a liberation by the approaching Allied troops…we fought each other really hard, but they couldn't miss (sic) us, because all the work depended on what we were producing. In the movie, the sabotage is the result of continual discussion between Sorowitsch, the partial collaborator who is concerned primarily with survival, and Adolf Burger, a printer and Communist activist who is willing to sacrifice his life, along with the lives of his fellow prisoners, in order to hamper the German war effort. This is the conflict that David Denby refers to and considers, correctly in my opinion, to be the film's central focus. Like Smolianoff, Burger is a real person. He wrote memoirs about his experiences shortly after the war and revised and re-published them, under the title The Devil's Workshop, in the 1970s. The introduction to an interview with Stefan Ryzowitzky, the director of The Counterfeiters (www.cineaste.com/articles/the-counterfeiters.htm), states that "Burger played a small but significant part in both establishing and sabotaging the process, although in the film he is presented as the leader of the campaign to subvert the operation." I believe that these examples show that there are consistent and coherent explanations for the ways in which Ryzowitzky adapted source material for his film: quite simply, to tell a better story and to emphasize the difference between the perspectives of Smolianoff/Sorowitsch and Burger. Throughout history, writers have adapted historical events to fit artistic purposes. Another, more extreme, cinematic example is in The Last King of Scotland where the Scottish doctor who befriends Idi Amin is entirely fictional. These alterations are not on the level of the deceptions of Binjamin Wilkomirski in Fragments or Misha Defonsece in Misha: a Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Although these books are presented as factual, they have, beyond any reasonably doubt, been exposed as creatures of their writers' imaginations. They present both short-term problems in that they give aid and comfort to those who wish to deny or minimize the Holocaust and more fundamental difficulties in that they lead readers to question the existence of historical truths at any level. In all of these situations, they are simple solutions. Dramatic renditions of historical events should include explicit statements of what is and is not historically accurate. Fictional narratives should be published as fiction even if such honesty reduces their status as potential best sellers. In these respects, filmmakers, publishers, and editors all share a responsibility with writers.

• Tense and very gripping war drama

  andrew-race2007-10-13

  I thought the film was excellent on a number of grounds; the acting by the main players was uniformly good,I suppose one could carp about the main Nazi in that it was the traditional mixture of ' jolly fine fellow when out of uniform and with blonde wife and children but nightmare when faced with the Untermenschen in the camp'. The main actor was unknown to me and something of an anti-hero but the gradual emergence of his positive sides was well done.The concentration on life in the special part of the camp where only the sounds of shouts and gunshots penetrate was very well portrayed and the entire film gripped me from start to finish. I suppose there were no amazing revelations apart from the basis of the story but that was more than enough and I recommend it highly