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3 1/2 stars (out of four)

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, “The Counterfeiters” may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

“Lives” was a German production about the intertwined fates of a Stasi surveillance expert and the theatrical bohemians on whom he eavesdropped. The Austrian feature “The Counterfeiters,” from Viennese writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky, deals with far more ghastly horrors in Germany’s recent history, chronicling the Faustian bargain struck by a Jewish master counterfeiter confined—in startling exception to the horrors and carnage around him—to what he and his 141 fellow prisoners called a “golden cage” within the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The film’s main character is based on Salomon Smolianoff, here called Salomon Sorowitsch, and played—brilliantly—by Viennese actor Karl Markovics. “The Counterfeiters” begins in Berlin 1936, when Sorowitsch, always on the move, mingling freely if edgily among the Nazis and the desperate night life, makes a good living forging papers. In these rapid-fire early scenes the anti-Semitism is everywhere, and the way Markovics plays these scenes, you’re riveted by the character’s survival instinct.

Ultimately this criminal is arrested by Inspector Herzog (Devid Striesow) and shipped off to the camps at Mauthausen. Through a fluke, acting on his wits, Sorowitsch becomes a resident artist for the SS. Herzog becomes an ambiguous, shadowy protector, setting up Sorowitsch at the center of “Operation Bernhard” upon his relocation to Sachsenhausen. Nearing the end of Hitler’s war, the SS embarked on the largest forgery operation of all time, wherein the counterfeiters were forced by their captors to forge British and American bank notes convincing enough to upend the Allies’ economies.

There is no typical concentration camp story. Anyone risks doing a miserable disservice to the millions killed by the Nazis by asserting otherwise. “The Counterfeiters” shares a couple of thematic elements with “Schindler’s List,” however, that sets their chosen stories apart. Both relay true stories of the grotesquely lucky. The Jews assigned to the forgery operation lived, for a time, in relative ease, with enough food to keep starvation at bay. A few hundred feet away, the worst suffering on Earth went on unabated.

It is an almost unthinkable juxtaposition. And it is a mark of the filmmaking and storytelling intelligence of “The Counterfeiters” that Ruzowitzky neither pours on the melodrama nor plays coy with the reality of things. (“Life is Beautiful” has a lot of explaining to do in that regard.) Everything feels urgent, vivid. The film is shot on the run, with hand-held cameras, recording a desperate series of developments. Many of Sorowitsch’s fellow prisoners will have none of the collusion; their interests lay strictly in sabotaging, subtly, the foreign currency project. Throughout the film the audience must deal with one survival mechanism pitted against another, and another.

The film is hindered only by some questionable flourishes of ironic romanticism. Tango music, evoking Sorowitsch’s high life, fills the soundtrack throughout. The script’s bookend scenes, depicting a postwar Sorowitsch at the gaming tables, in the arms of a call girl, and on the beach in Monte Carlo, belong to a different, less truthful sort of thriller.

But Markovics’ performance couldn’t be better. The character and the actor both think on their feet and shift, chameleon-like, in the blink of an eye, while remaining opaque on the surface. Sorowitsch, whose real-life counterpart has already inspired various fictionalized film and television treatments of the counterfeiters, will not be a conventionally heroic enough character for some. (I heard that complaint about Wladyslaw Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” and it still bugs me—what sort of “heroism” do you want with a survivor’s story such as his, exactly?) In “The Counterfeiters,” Sorowitsch says, “I won’t give the Nazis the pleasure of being ashamed I’m still alive.” That is a difficult, complicated expression of defiance, and it lies at the heart of a very good film.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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