And the Oscar goes to … “The Counterfeiters,” a predictable but decent choice for this year’s best foreign language film award.
This is the first Oscar won by Austria in that category, and the subject is a reliable one for such wins: It’s the true story of a bold attempt by the Nazis to counterfeit British and U.S. currency, with the idea of flooding the markets with false bills.
At the center of the story is an expert forger named Salomon Sorowitsch (played by the compelling Karl Markovics). Being Jewish, he’s in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but because of his counterfeiting skills, his particular cage is gilded.
The Nazis set “Sally” up with a small operation to crack the puzzle of the English pound. He and his crew are housed in their own section of the camp and given better treatment than the other prisoners.
The story of the fake money is engrossing enough, but of course director Stefan Ruzowitsky is after deeper things. The cynical Sally is bent on surviving this ordeal, while others in his crew question whether their efforts are aiding the Nazi war machine.
This is an eternally fascinating issue when it comes to concentration camp stories, and Ruzowitsky offers no easy means of approaching his apparently amoral hero.
Even so, the movie would be less powerful without the performance of Karl Markovics, an actor with a long, sunken face, wiry body and a skeptical air. He disappears into Sally’s shadowy personality in a completely convincing way.
The film has an echo of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” in its portrait of a man who lets a technical challenge blind him to the larger cause. This is a more monotonous movie, however, an indoor story rather than an outdoor epic.
Even though Ruzowitzky raises interesting issues, there’s something a little pat about the way everything works out. (And maybe that’s what the Oscar voters, who tend to make safe choices in this category, were going with.) Still, for anybody who can’t get enough World War II movies, this provides yet another wrinkle on the inexhaustible topic.
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