- guardian.co.uk,
- Monday March 17 2008 16:32 GMT
This Austrian movie won the best foreign language film ahead of Germany's The Lives of Others. A worthy addition to the region's burgeoning cinema, The Counterfeiters completes a quartet of memorable post-Pianist films set in the war era, after Downfall, Fateless and Black Book, and also skilfully avoids the cliches of the genre. Like the Hungarian movie Fateless, The Counterfeiters is largely set in concentration camps, but conditions are less grim than might be expected due to the fact that the ace Jewish forger and his team are an essential part of the war effort and are therefore given special privileges: cigarettes, clean beds and even, as a special reward, a table-tennis table. The real horrors are taking place on the other side of their compound wall, away from their own incarceration in what they call "the golden cage".
The film is based on the memoir of one of the team, the principled Adolf Burger, who feels it is his duty to sabotage an operation which, in the latter stages of the war, was helping to finance the Nazis' war effort. This is the film's central dilemma: should you go for the greater ideological good if it threatens the lives of the friends you are working with as well as your own? The story it tells remains gripping and engrossing, in particular through the smart performance of the gaunt lead actor Karl Markowics (a Viennese like director Stefan Ruzowitsky), who offers an intriguing mixture of pragmatism, criminality and decency.
