The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion The Bridge on the River Kwai of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.
When we first meet the anti-hero, Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), it's in 1936 Berlin, and he's merely the world's best counterfeiter. But when, in 1944, he enters an incongruously cushy corner of the Sachsenhausen camp, he gets the chance to achieve a goal he never mastered on the outside: Creating a perfect copy of the U.S. dollar bill. It's his version of Alec Guinness' Colonel Nicholson's building his magnificent bridge while ensconced in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp of David Lean's celebrated war epic.
The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics) Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl. Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. Rated R for sex, language and brutality. In German, with English subtitles. Time 98 minutes.
