The Counterfeiters (2007)

The Counterfeiters comes to us from 2007, which is to say from a period before the present cultural accounting took firm hold, and it conducts itself with the confidence of a film that never expected to be audited. Stefan Ruzowitzky's picture concerns Operation Bernhard, the Nazi scheme to destabilize the British economy with forged pound notes, and the Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen conscripted to print them. The cast is entirely white and European. The concerns are the concerns of 1943. Nobody in the frame is thinking about how the frame will read two decades later, and the film is better for it.

What the film does possess is moral weight of an older and sturdier kind. Salomon Sorowitsch, a forger by trade and a survivor by instinct, must weigh his professional pride in counterfeiting the American dollar against his fellow prisoners' determination to sabotage the operation. Ruzowitzky stages these arguments among the inmates and then steps back, declining to tell us which man is right. The Jewish prisoners are Jewish because history placed them there, not because the screenplay wishes to make a point about it. There is no gender-conscious framing, no environmental subtext, no indictment of the market economy, no scene in which a character explains the moral of the story to the audience. The film trusts its own narrative.

It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it earned that honor through craft, not messaging. Adapted from Adolf Burger's memoir, it dramatizes real events without rearranging them into a more flattering shape. The result is a serious film about a serious subject that never confuses seriousness with instruction. Viewers in search of contemporary confirmation will leave empty-handed. Viewers in search of a taut, well-acted thriller about men forging money under the worst possible circumstances will leave satisfied.