Counterfeiters, The

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"The Counterfeiters" was Austria's entry in the 2008 Academy Awards, and it won Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, the first Austrian entry to do so. I hadn't seen the entries it edged out--"12," "Beaufort," "Katyn," and "Mongol"--but it's easy to see why this Stefan Ruzowitzky film appealed to judges.

Based on a book by former Operation Bernhard inmate Adolph Burger, "The Counterfeiters" parts the curtain to show a glimpse into a little-known facet of concentration camp history, and the subject matter itself is fascinating enough to be compelling. Beginning in 1942, SS Major Bernhard Krüger established a team of nearly 150 counterfeiters in a secret section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where design and printing experts were treated as if they were in a bad hotel rather than a death camp. The goal was to duplicate the British pound notes so precisely that not even the Bank of England could tell the difference, then flood the market with the notes and collapse the British economy. In fact, one of the most outrageous scenes in the movie shows a German agent trying to deposit a large number of the pound notes to see if they pass the test, then getting bold and insisting that the bank's word that they're authentic isn't good enough. He directs them to send them to the Bank of England, who also validate the notes as being authentic.

Amazingly, some nine million British pound notes were printed with a total value of close to 135 million pounds. Buoyed by their success, the Nazis next directed their counterfeiting team to tackle the U.S. dollar. But the Nazis didn't have the means to carry out their plan to distribute the pound notes--using them instead to finance covert operations and also reportedly rescue Italian dictator Benito Mussolini--and the war ended before the prisoners could give their German overseers a second perfect forgery.

There's no big-picture treatment here, with enough of a sense of how major an impact the dumped pounds would have had on the British economy and war effort, or even much beyond what goes on inside the camp. Instead, like "The Grey Zone" (2001), the focus is on the moral dilemma that the prisoners face. Professionals all (some legal, some illegal), their pride kicks in, but their lives also depend on their success. Still, all of the men realize that they are going to be killed like the rest of the Jews in the concentration camp once their usefulness is outlived, and helping the German war effort is also perversely moving them closer to their own deaths--despite promises of villas and women if they do their jobs well, pampered prisoners for life. As a 90-year-old Burger says on one of the bonus features, "We were dead men on holiday. We never expected to walk away from this secret operation."

Can there possibly be a better premise for a dramatic film?

And yet, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that the opportunity was squandered, "The Counterfeiters" feels more ordinary than its extraordinary subject matter. Screenwriter-director Ruzowitzky chose to focus mostly on the relationship between master-forger Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) and printer Adolph Burger (August Diehl), and that keeps it both somewhat insular and low-key. He also downplayed the elements we normally associate with concentration camps, giving little screen time to the horrors and largely restricting us to Sally's more privileged point of view. There's not even the tension of not knowing whether Sally lives or dies, because this is a frame story that begins with the famed counterfeiter passing more of his funny money at a post-war Monte Carlo Casino. To his credit, though, Ruzowitzky also fought any temptation to add elements in order to create of tenser dramatic structure. Even if the result is a slice-of-life film that feels like a slice-of-life, for good or for bad, and the camerawork and editing are also pretty nuts-and-bolts, that matter-of-factness also supports the realistic integrity of the film. Not a lot happens in this film other than the yoked prisoners doing their jobs and trying to stay alive in the process.

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