The Counterfeiters

Winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, this German docudrama is a worthy successor to The Lives of Others in its historical evocation of the moral dilemmas propounded by authoritarian evil. Stefan Ruzowitzky adapts a nonfiction memoir into a story about inmates of a Nazi concentration camp recruited for their artistic, printing, or banking skills into a counterfeiting scheme to ruin Allied economies by flooding them with false currency. They realize that their survival, and even comfort, is bought at the risk of extending the war, so while they do produce more than 130 million pounds, subtle sabotage keeps them from perfecting the dollar, just long enough for their camp to be liberated in 1945. Karl Markovics is remarkable as the seemingly amoral artist and con man who takes to the task as to the masterpiece of his craft. The film is swift and continuously engrossing, while remaining even-handed and morally complex. It does not wallow in the awfulness of the Holocaust, but reveals it in short, strong strokes of heart-piercing sharpness, then gets on with the question of how and why you might survive in such a surreal situation of total risk. What it comes down to is the same wisdom shared by the wonderful characters of Bunk and Omar in The Wire: “Man’s gotta have a code.” (2008, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-78.)