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Conning survival in rich war camp drama
By Edith Tam |
April 12, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
FANS of the triple-Oscar winning "La Vita e bella" (1997) will see a common theme explored in the newly released "The Counterfeiters," both pursuing on a brighter note stories of confidence tricksters working within the tragic environment of life in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
"The Counterfeiters" fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the highest-level Nazis to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England currency.
It is a 2006 Austrian-German film written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (who also directed "Anatomie" and "All the Queen's Men") and is based on a memoir by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation and later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard.
Told in flashback, it outlines how the Jewish hero Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) - a conman who plays the tricks and the women - survives the war.
"Sally" Sorowitsch is "the king of counterfeiters," living a mischievous life of gambling, booze and women in Berlin when the war starts. He is arrested by Nazi superintendent Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow) and thrown into Mauthausen concentration camp.
Here his special drawing talents come to the fore in making passports and currency notes, thus keeping him away from deadly hard labor and mass killing. Some years later, he is transferred to a special counterfeiting section in Sachsenhausen camp to produce "money" for the Nazis to flood the UK's currency market.
Fake notes
Herzog treats his prisoners to nice living conditions and after the successful production of fake pound notes they are rewarded with a table tennis table and more spare time. Their next task is US dollar counterfeiting which is where the movie deals with the dilemma the counterfeiters are faced with in salvaging their own lives or assisting the Nazi plans. The latter would prolong the war and risk the lives of more fellow prisoners.
The film returns full circle to post-war Monte Carlo's casinos where "Sally" is playing with the currency that he forged.
After losing it all at the tables, a bar girl comforts him that it is only money, to which he replies "I can always make more."
The lead character is consistent throughout the story, whether in captivity during the war or after, with a quirky sense of humor and enjoyment of life paramount.
Ruzowitzky' script is beautifully crafted and "The Counterfeiters" is peopled with clearly drawn characters °?- such as a radical socialist rebel and a nice "kapo" doctor - and intricate detail of money-making methods. The hero is not only likable but also richly rounded and down to earth.
The plot is rich with tension and glimpses of humor, drawing sharp contrasts between the counterfeiters' relatively luxurious life while Jewish inmates all around them suffer and die under appalling conditions.
Screening now in local cinemas, in Chinese with English subtitles, it won Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2008.
"The Counterfeiters" fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the highest-level Nazis to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England currency.
It is a 2006 Austrian-German film written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (who also directed "Anatomie" and "All the Queen's Men") and is based on a memoir by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation and later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard.
Told in flashback, it outlines how the Jewish hero Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) - a conman who plays the tricks and the women - survives the war.
"Sally" Sorowitsch is "the king of counterfeiters," living a mischievous life of gambling, booze and women in Berlin when the war starts. He is arrested by Nazi superintendent Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow) and thrown into Mauthausen concentration camp.
Here his special drawing talents come to the fore in making passports and currency notes, thus keeping him away from deadly hard labor and mass killing. Some years later, he is transferred to a special counterfeiting section in Sachsenhausen camp to produce "money" for the Nazis to flood the UK's currency market.
Fake notes
Herzog treats his prisoners to nice living conditions and after the successful production of fake pound notes they are rewarded with a table tennis table and more spare time. Their next task is US dollar counterfeiting which is where the movie deals with the dilemma the counterfeiters are faced with in salvaging their own lives or assisting the Nazi plans. The latter would prolong the war and risk the lives of more fellow prisoners.
The film returns full circle to post-war Monte Carlo's casinos where "Sally" is playing with the currency that he forged.
After losing it all at the tables, a bar girl comforts him that it is only money, to which he replies "I can always make more."
The lead character is consistent throughout the story, whether in captivity during the war or after, with a quirky sense of humor and enjoyment of life paramount.
Ruzowitzky' script is beautifully crafted and "The Counterfeiters" is peopled with clearly drawn characters °?- such as a radical socialist rebel and a nice "kapo" doctor - and intricate detail of money-making methods. The hero is not only likable but also richly rounded and down to earth.
The plot is rich with tension and glimpses of humor, drawing sharp contrasts between the counterfeiters' relatively luxurious life while Jewish inmates all around them suffer and die under appalling conditions.
Screening now in local cinemas, in Chinese with English subtitles, it won Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2008.
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