The Counterfeiters (2007)
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The Counterfeiters Movie Review
The Counterfeiters is a 2007 Austrian historical drama film directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky and starring Karl Markovics. It’s yet another forgettable WWII movie.
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“Only by surviving,
we can defeat them“
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It follows a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation, and was later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard. This story really happened, and it was cleared by the man himself who approved it. That’s why it has some power to it, though it’s still way too weak to be enjoyed more.
I am talking about its very standard approach to directing and overall storytelling. It has a strong moral dilemma at the center of it, but it’s never really explored properly. Instead, we get a bunch of boring dialogue scenes or standard concentration camp scenes that make the movie boring. It felt long despite its rather short runtime.
What is admittedly great here is the acting which is good across the board, though of course Karl Markovics himself shines the most in a great, memorable central role. He’s so good that he carries the entire movie on his shoulders, and he makes it more authentic than it could have been without him.
The Counterfeiters is definitely well made, well shot and it has fine dialogue, but it isn’t as thematically rich as the premise demanded, and overall the film is technically only passable without ever being artistic in any way. The direction from Ruzowitzky is overall quite weak.
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The movie is famous for receiving the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in what is one of the biggest injustices in the history of this category. I am of course talking about ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ which was a festival and critical darling, and a great movie in its own right. The fact that that movie wasn’t even nominated is a travesty. This was the first Austrian movie to receive an Oscar, and it was just not deserved in any shape or form.
The Counterfeiters is competently made, very well acted and it has an interesting fact-based premise to it, but the execution is very weak, the film is never as sophisticated as it should have been and it’s just another standard WWII flick with nothing new to offer. Needless to say, its Oscar win was very problematic.
