Blood Money

Comments (0) By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Feb 20 2008

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When an Austrian filmmaker who makes no secret of the fact that his grandparents were Nazi sympathizers makes a fact-based movie (nominated by the Academy for best foreign film) about a Jewish forger who survived the concentration camps by printing money for the German war effort, is he a brave boy or a rotten apple falling unpleasantly close to his nation's tarnished tree? Viennese actor Karl Markovics gives a masterful portrayal of Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, a shifty-eyed, hatchet-faced criminal Jew, but The Counterfeiters plays like a realist drama whose purpose is to spring Sorowitsch from stereotype and expose him as a flawed man torn between his Darwinian credo (adapt) and a fatherly desire to protect the weak. Writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky keeps the physical brutality peripheral, in part to underscore the predicament of the counterfeiters, who live in a velvet prison next door to the hell that other inmates suffered. Based on a memoir by Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a Communist inmate who opposed Sorowitsch's collusion and advocated sabotage, the film succumbs to a heroic climax of sorts. But at its best -- and queasiest -- The Counterfeiters asks what counts as moral behavior under fascism, and whether or not one's first duty is to survive.
Mon., March 3, 2008