#die falscher

Die Fälscher, Stefan Ruzowitzky (2007) A film following Operation Bernhard, the largest counterfeiting operation in history. 

“The Counterfeiters, written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, is a morally challenging twist on the long and honourable tradition of forgery movies.“

Not only do I particularly agree with this review, but one could extend the statement to apply it to the long and honourable tradition of historical films depicting the horrors of the holocaust. Ruzowitzky’s film offers a very different perspective from other fantastic films such as Schindler’s List, The Pianist, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas etc.

Instead, Die Fälscher portrays the lives of those who were considered “privileged” during the holocaust, but also the hardships that came with such a “privilege”. 

Last night I watched 'Die Fälscher' ('The Counterfeiters'). It's a powerful film which explores the concepts of loyalty, suffering, loss, guilt and self-preservation.

I'd recommend it to anyone.

So I think I fulfilled my quota of foreign movies this month. I saw this Japanese sci-fi flick called Casshern last weekend, and then the Romanian 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Tonight I saw The Counterfeiters, an Austrian movie that I have been dying to see since I first heard about it.

Now I don’t exactly have the stomach for movies about real-life situations that we all know has happened and which continues to resonate with people today, but this movie is just brilliant. Usually, when Saving Private Ryan comes on or something or Band of Brothers, I switch the channel because it’s too painful to watch. Hell, I could barely sit through Titanic the first time I saw it, but I was what, twelve when I saw the movie? I’ve sat through The Pianist and that was really difficult. I have never seen Schindler’s List. I’ve seen a lot of movies that I think you kind of need to see but are painful to sit through because of the subject matter.

Anyway, so The Counterfeiters [Die Falscher] is a film directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, an Austrian filmmaker. Now an Academy Award-winning movie for Best Foreign Language Film, it revolves around Salomon Sorowitsch (played by Karl Markovics), an expert Jewish counterfeiter at large in Nazi Germany. He is captured by a young officer who is then promoted to Herr Herzog in charge of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where Sorowitsch is sent. At Sachsenhausen, the Jewish prisoners are assembled to start printing money for the Nazi war effort, and Sorowitsch is assigned to assure quality control of these counterfeits.

The film raises some important questions. If you were in Sorowitsch’s shoes, would you help the Nazis by printing money to save your own skin? Or would you rebel against them, even if it meant losing your life and the lives of the other men in the concentration camp? It’s a complicated scenario, and the movie portrays this beautifully. Ideally, people would say, “Oh, I would rather die than help out the men who murdered my family and who will most likely murder me too.” But this movie takes you back into that time and most likely realists would then say that Sorowitsch was clever in his devices to use his experience in counterfeiting to turn the tide, however minimal that tide was.

With tremendous performances from every single character in the film, it’s overall a very well-done movie. It’s got sharp dialogue and gripping performances, and it means something. It’s an important movie. I just found out that the film is actually based on the book by one of the characters in the movie, I’m assuming a real-life concentration camp prisoner, Adolf Burger, who is played by the extremely talented Auguste Diehl, who has appeared in several Austrian films. Diehl kind of overshadowed Markovics in some ways, because his dramatic performance and overall intensity that he brought to the character was so phenomenal that you almost wanted to jump out of your seat and give him a hug and tell him everything will be all right. Markovics, however, showed more range. Imagine, having to struggle to stay cool when you’re being peed on by a Nazi officer who constantly rags on you about being Jewish filth?

                               The film was heart-wrenching, and this is a good thing, because if it didn’t elicit sighs of sadness or gasps of horror at the events that most probably took place and were probably more brutal than can be tolerated on screen, then there’s something wrong. I cried a little in the film, and rightly so. I cried in Titanic but only because Leo DiCaprio died and he was cute. But this movie? I wanted to bawl my eyes out but instead, opted for the composed tearing up of the eyes.

"Os falsários" (die falscher) - cinema.

Minha ideia era ver "Desejo e perigo", mas a sessão estava lotada. Para não perder a viagem entrei nesse. Ganhou o oscar de melhor estrangeiro no ano passado e demorou pra chegar por aqui. O que ganhou nesse ano já está em cartaz. Não sabia muito, apenas que se passava na segunda guerra.