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Dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky
Rating: 7.2 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
A bit character study, a bit docu-drama, writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky's fascinating film explores a little-known special ops known as Operation Berhard, wherein the Germans employed to try to steer the second world war in their direction: financial ruination of their enemies. In one little corner of Sachsenhausen, a German concentration camp, Sturmbannführer Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow) creates a special Jewish-prisoner task force, whose sole mission is to create forged currency of enemy countries. Ostensibly, the idea is to create a large enough amount of counterfeit money to throw that nation's economy into utter chaos, but as the war rages on, and the Germans are repelled from Russia, the Third Reich actually needs to use the bills as currency for themselves in order to continue to pay for the massive war effort. In return for excellent forgeries, the imprisoned Jews, led by master-forger "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics, with whose geometric cheekbones and misaligned nose resembles a cross between Richard Edson and Peter Cushing), are given special treatment: A reasonable bed, adequate food, eventually, a ping pong table. To most of the prisoners, including Sally, that is more than fair, but one, lone hold out, Burger (August Diehl), maintains that what the Jews are being forced to do amounts to treason against their own people by helping the Germans continue their war efforts. As is the style of many a Holocaust rendering, the film's colors are muted and dulled, but the story -- based on Adolf Burger's memoir -- is anything but colorless. Indeed, one of the film's central ironies is just how lucky these Jews were to have been spared the worst of what the Germans were capable -- powerfully reinforced when the war finally ends and the survivors outside Herzog's little enclave finally break into this closed-off portion of the camp. So fit and healthy do Sally and his men appear to the filthy, emaciated emancipators that they at first are taken for SS, only their Auschwitz ID tattoos convince them otherwise. The film begins and ends in Monte Carlo, where Sally has come to dispense with some of his brilliantly forged bills after the war. At odds with the luxurious, care-free setting, it's clear Sally is suffering formidably. Throwing chips heedlessly at well-heeled casinos, taking no pleasure in winning, he represents the worst kind of the best luck imaginable.
This edition is loaded with special features, including track commentaries, deleted scenes and interviews with the real Adolf Burger as well as Markovics and Ruzowitzky.
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