The Counterfeiters

Oscar winning Austrian drama, The Counterfeiters, is a film that asks questions. It asks when morality becomes martyrdom, and when self-preservation becomes self-destruction. Set during the dying days of World War II, the film is about Operation Bernhard; the Nazis’ plan to flood and destroy British and American economies by falsifying enormous amounts of authentic-looking currency. In order to do this all Jewish prisoners skilled as graphic designers, printers, painters or bankers are transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Amongst them is Berlin’s most talented pre-war counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, and Adolf Burger, a passionate Communist who was arrested for producing anti-Nazi posters (who actually wrote the book on which this film is based). These emaciated, wounded individuals are drawn into a comparative luxury when they arrive at Sachsenhausen, where they are presented with clean sheets and a ping pong table as motivational ‘incentives.’ Therein lies the moral quandary – how can these men enjoy their relative comfort when prisoners are being tortured within their earshot?

The film is sharply confronting, but in a powerfully original way. Rather than showing us the terror of the camp through onscreen violence, the message of horror is conveyed through torturous ironies – the prisoners, for example, break down with shocked surprise when they are taken into a shower block, only to actually be bathed in hot water. It’s also a film that does not deal in the black and white dualities that usually accompany war dramas, but rather skips through a whole multitude of grey shades. Each new character is another complex individual, battling to figure out what they believe is right. The conflict between Sorowitsch and Burger is a fascinating picture of clashing moralities, presenting two men with such different ideas but equally honourable intentions. Some moments of dialogue do jar, but on the whole this is a gripping drama, and it goes some way to proving that no matter how many wartime films are made, there really are always more stories waiting to be told.

Rating: 9.0

vier minuten; outsourced

Next Monday (10 December), Sommerville replaces The Dinner Guest with Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) – a highly taut German character study. This film follows the elderly piano tutor Traude Kruger (Monica Bleibtreu), as she struggles to impart some musical knowledge onto Jenny (Hannah Herzsprung), a gifted but traumatised inmate at the woman’s penitentiary. Though the two women are divided by age and by experience, a potent, almost electric, relationship develops between them, forcing them both to come to terms with the weight of their pasts as they titter perilously between sanity and hysteria. And far from diverging into a sloppy fairytale about the transformative power of music, Four Minutes remains captivating in its complexity; positioning music simultaneously as the interest that unites the woman, and as the force that divides and torments them. Get ready for another darkly enthralling offering from Germany, propelled by a powerful soundtrack and two near-flawless performances.

Rating: 8.0

Meanwhile, at Sommerville’s sister cinema, Joondalup Pines (located at ECU Joondalup), the PIAF film seasons gets started with Outsourced – a cross-cultural romantic comedy set against the backdrop of call centre chaos. The zaniness begins when Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton) is forced to swap his comfortable Seattle office cubicle for a dingy building in the middle on the outskirts of an Indian city. Here, his new job to educate Indian telemarketing staff in the art of sounding American. More cynical cinema-goers will be frustrated by Todd’s extreme cultural ignorance, as well as by the unrealistic and somewhat simple romance that develops between him and the vivacious Asha (Ayesha Dharker), one of his staff members. Nonetheless, there’s something quite delightfully humorous about this brazen culture clash (nothing beats the comedic impact of a cow nonchalantly wandering through an office), and there is relief to be found in other moments of the film, when the scriptwriters’ demonstrate an astute ability to portray those more nuanced cultural differences, and inevitable cultural similarities.

Rating: 6.9