2007 Winner, The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters

Director:        Stefan Ruzowitzky

Distributed by:  Filmladen/Universum Film

Released:  March 2007

County:  Austria/Germany

The concept of the “antihero” has always appealed to me.  Today, you can’t turn on the TV without finding a show that has one to root for—think Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, Tywin Lannister.  And so many great films have had us hoping for the best for the “bad” guys, like Al Pacino in The Godfather and William Holden in Stalag 17.  These protagonists are immoral, live only for themselves, and will generally disregard anyone else’s interests.  You know, like millennials.  (JK, Millennials!).

Javert, Les Miserables

But one thing most good antiheroes have is that one speck of decency that makes them do the right thing every once in a while, maybe even in a spectacular way.  After all, Michael Corleone loved his kids and Sefton helped to catch the real mole in Stalag 17.  In The Counterfeiters, Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch is that man.  As you can probably guess from the title, Salomon likes to make fake money.  He is the best in the business—his phony currency looks, feels, and even smells like the real thing—no Monopoly guys on his fake bills, that’s for sure.  And Salomon is living large because of it.  But Sally is a Jew, and one ought not be a Jew in 1930’s Germany.  He gets caught by a zealous Nazi Javert-type who has it in for him and is sent off to the nearest local concentration camp.

Bill Holden as Sgt. Sefton, Stalag 17: The Classic Anti-hero

Sally is able to get special treatment because he is a darn good artist—a skill he had to have as a counterfeiter.  Soon he is selling portraits for better food, and is living just a little better than the rest of the inmates.  Some Nazis somewhere hear that Sally is really good at making the fake German marks—they wonder, could he do it with British pounds?  They figure if you could flood Britannia with fake bills, you could wreak all sorts of havoc with the English economy.  Sally is just guy they need to pull it off.

So Sally and some of his chums start cranking out the fake bills for the Nazis.  Sally is a perfectionist and is damn proud of his craft, so it doesn’t take long for him to lose his priorities.  Before long, he is like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, obsessing over the craft and forgetting who the real enemy is.

Nick Nolte, film version of Mother Night

In his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”  As a counterfeiter extraordinaire, Sally has to figure out who he is:  Is he a counterfeiter who happens to be Jewish, working for the Nazis to get treated better; or is he a Jewish guy who happens to be a counterfeiter, pretending  he is helping the Nazis but really looking for a way to sabotage his enemy?  And will he show that speck of decency that makes anti-heroes so fun to root for?   

Like most Holocaust-related films, this movie is mostly bleak in tone.  But the actor who plays Saloman, Karl Markovics, brings a lightness and a self-assuredness that makes him easy to root for, kind of like Holden in Stalag 17.  As a counterfeiting anti-hero, he is the real deal.

The Title:  Die Fälscher.  Die makes the article "the" plural; this isn't about a threat against some guy named Herr Falscher.

The Culture:  A decent, if unimportant culturally, addition to the Holocaust-related cannon.

Agenda Danger:  Nazis are bad.  But you knew that.

Best Picture that year:   No Country for Old Men

Rating:  As a non-war war movie, this one hits the mark.  The real kind.

2014 Winner, Ida

Ida

Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

Distributor: Solopan

Released:  September 2013

Country:  Poland

 

In the past 20 years, a quarter of the Best Foreign Film Oscar winners  have had storylines involving Jewish persecution during the Second World War (specifically—Son of Saul, The Counterfeiters, Nowhere in Africa, Life Is Beautiful, and this film).  Interestingly, most of these stories (the exception being Son of Saul) have had a vein of hope and the spirit to overcome tragedy running through them.  Ida, the first Polish film to ever win the award, earns its place among these great films.

Lis

Ida, we learn, is a novice nun about to take her full vows in the Catholic Church.  But this is no Salzburg, with Ida twirling around the Alps--it is 1960’s Poland, and the film’s black-and-white bleakness reflects Poland’s post-war communism. Before taking her vows, the Mother Abbess orders Ida to go visit her Aunt Wanda, a dutiful and cruel Communist judge who enthusiastically imposes the authoritarian government’s harsh penalties upon its citizenry.  Wanda smokes and drinks and sleeps around, unable to deal with, it seems, the guilt she feels at having survived the war and its aftermath in the manner that she has.  Ida, we soon learn, is not really “Ida” at all, but Anna, a Jewish girl saved by the abbey from the Nazis when she was a baby.  Wanda urges Anna that before she goes full nun she should climb every mountain and ford every stream.   The mountain presents itself in the form of Lis, a pretty-boy musician Wanda and Anna pick up hitchhiking.  Will Ida stay on the nun career-track, or will she follow the lead of her Aunt Red Wanda and say “so long, farewell” to the convent?  How do you solve a problem like Ida  . . .  has?

Captain von Trapp

The Catholic Church is a frequent target in filmdom, both at home and abroad; in Ida, the Church is the reason Ida is alive.  The choice Ida/Anna has to make is not an easy one.  For her entire life she has prepared herself to be a nun—the quiet isolation of the abbey seems a great solace in such a dreary time and place.  And her sax-playing paramour is no Captain von Trapp.  But choosing the life of self over God seems enticing, especially after knowing the way she had come to the abbey.

While the tone of Ida may seem depressing, on the whole I found this story to be oddly uplifting.  But the lack of nondiegetic music—music heard by the audience but not by the characters in the film—contributes to the sense of seclusion felt by Ida, by those in the abbey, and perhaps by even Poland herself.  The 80-minute length of this film feels about right; no need to wallow in the Holocaust and post-war Stalinism any longer than we need to. Honestly, this movie doesn’t rank up there as among my favorite things.  That said, this quiet little film deserves a look. 

The Title:  Pronounced “EE-da.”  The Jewish name for our heroine, Anna.

Culture:  The bleakness of communist Poland some years after the end of World War II is underscored by the black-and-white cinematography and lack of a laugh-track.  The war may have been won by the Allies, but we can see that Poland didn’t come out a winner.

Agenda danger:  If you are a National Socialist or just a regular Socialist, you may walk away feeling insulted.  The movie does portray the Catholic Church as an agent of good, though not in an over-the-top way.

Best Picture that year:  Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Rating:  I’ll give it a 16-going-on-17 out of 20.