Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters opens on a beach in Monte Carlo where Salomon Sorowitsch (the great Karl Markovics) is sitting in a nice suit and a briefcase. Ten minutes later, Salomon walks into the swankest hotel in the gambling paradise and opens the case to discover a king's bounty of crisp bills. You'd mean the guy was James Bond's ragged older brother but, in truth, the guy has earned the right to be a ruthless money-spender.
Based on the true report of a group of Jewish counterfeiters that worked for the Nazis, Ruzowitzky casts Sorowitsch as the morally negligent foreman of a radical of counterfeiters. Already an accomplished counterfeiter before organism caught, Salomon (his friends call him Solly) gets put in job of the money counterfeiting operation by Herzog (an imposingly whiny Devid Striesow), the commander of his electric current camp and the world who originally arrested Salomon.
Sorowitsch gets a morally righteous kick in the stones by blighter prisoner Adolf Burger (played with copious rage by August Diehl), who would later go onto write the nonfiction story that the film is based on. Adolf starts laying it on thick when Sorowitsch is handed the task of making consummate counterfeits of the American dollar. Burger, given the news that his married woman was shot for trying to escape, uses his job at the lightpress to sabotage all of Sorowitsch's molds. Herzog and his diabolical right-hand man Holst (Martin Brambach) threaten to shoot random employees unless they can make a perfect counterfeit dollar.
Things are leftfield relatively ambiguous to Salomon until Holst executes the young Kolya (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a offspring man world Health Organization took Sorowitsch as his father figure. The filmmaking also seems ambiguous. It's a consistent film, in tone and in fib, but with films as outlandishly boldness as Fateless and last year's brilliant Black Book rethinking the War, its victims, and perceptions of the consequence, something as terminally normal as The Counterfeiters comes off as hay in a hayrick. That goes for well-nigh every facet of the production as well the playing: Cinematographer Benedict Neuenfels' camerawork does its job succinctly but with no vitality and Marius Ruhland's score sounds like it came out of a stool. And don't get me started on the paint-by-numbers production design.
My fury o'er what films the Academy chooses to nominate, forget alone those that bring home the bacon, might ne'er subside, but The Counterfeiters certainly isn't the worst film they've ever picked (my alternative: Life is Beautiful). That being aforementioned, how a film like this sneaks past genuinely great films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Host, or the aforementioned Black Book may be one of those gravid mysteries that are never meant to be resolved. For now, however, The Counterfeiters joins that stratum of films like Tsotsi and The Sea Inside that are just good enough to look like they matter and ar digestible sufficiency for the Academy to continue its unparalleled losing streak in celebrating esthetic accomplishment. Be sure to tune in Sunday.
Aka Die F�lscher.
Fake!
See Also
Wednesday 6 August 2008
The Counterfeiters - 8/5/2008
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