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English Language Movies in Madrid - The Counterfeiters

English Language Movies in Madrid - The Counterfeiters

Anna Bogutskaia
What do you live for? What would you die for? These are questions that The Countefeiters...

The Counterfeiters

Cine Yelmo Ideal
Calle Dr. Cortezo, 6
Metro Sol/Tirso de Molina

What do you live for? What would you die for? These are questions that The Countefeiters (Die Fälscher), the recipient of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, centre on. Unsympathetic leading man Salomon Solowitsch is presented as a successful counterfeiter leading a hedonistic existence who is unbothered by the incipient war and persecution of the Jews.

After being captured halfway through the forging the the elusive Dollar, he makes his way through jail and hard labour by painting portraits and murals for the guards. Thanks to his talents, he is recruited by Herzog – the same man who captured him – to lead Operation Bernhard, a grand-scale fraud designed to help finance the war and destabilize the British economy. It is here that Sorowitsch is faced with the dilemma that is the main attraction of this film: should he continue his superficial, self-centered existence or consider the big picture and the implications of his actions?

Sorowitsch is a bold protagonist; his evolution is not a Hollywood miracle but a slow-paced and painful process, heightened by sporadic yet effective glimpses into the bleakness of his situation. Really, he isn’t doing anything all that different from what he did on the outside, before war and Operation Bernhard. Yet the closer he gets to his fellow prisoners, especially melancholic communist Burger and art student Kolya, the harder it becomes to remain apathetic.

His back story is left unexplored, which makes him all the more intriguing: is he a failed artist turned criminal or a forger with artistic sensibilities? Where does he get his fierce honour code from? Does he care for anyone or about anything except “his art”?

Amongst the supporting players, Burger is a whole other film waiting to happen. The only politically conscious character, he is the closest you’ll get to a typical movie hero. (Incidentally, Burger is also the only factual character, the film being based on his memoirs and every single draft of the script was personally proof-read by him.) The rest of the characters, both Nazis and counterfeiters, are mainly driven either by greed or self-preservation.

The prisoners struggle too, torn between their will to survive and the guilt of doing so, the shame in aiding a war in order to live. Conflict emerges when some are willing to die instead of working for the enemy, while others refuse to sabotage their comfortable means of survival. Their brawls challenge the viewer too: what would you do? How far will morals, principles or politics take you? The Counterfeiters rings truer than most of the WWII Hollywood mush precisely because it focuses on the characters, the people, rather than historical propaganda. The glimpses into the day-to-day brutality of concentration camps hit the viewer harder than an hour long parade of war atrocities and mawkish close ups of children crying.