Austrian filmmaker Ruzowitzky directed one of the worst films of recent years, All the Queen’s Men (2001), a so-called “comedy” (starring Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard) about drag queens set in World War II. Now this inept amateur returns with The Counterfeiters. This time, it’s a critic-proof movie, based on a true story and set in a WWII concentration camp. It’s so critic-proof that, despite its ham-fisted technique, it went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The appealing, long-faced Markovics plays Salomon Sorowitsch, who makes a comfortable living crafting fake passports and such before the Nazis discover and arrest him. They force him to use his skills to imitate the British pound and the American dollar, with which the forces of evil will attempt to destroy the world economy. As motivation, Salomon and his colleagues are treated well, with good food and soft beds. He and his team go to work, but certain men are more interested in subverting the evil plan than in saving their own lives.
Ruzowitzky presents this material in the clumsiest, most mundane way imaginable. Though many, many scenes take place in the workshop, we never get a sense of the men actually working, no glimpse of the details of their jobs or their methods. When Ruzowitzky begins a scene, it’s more like the actors are waiting for a cue than actually working. Ruzowitzky’s rudimentary screenplay, adapted from a book by Adolf Burger, uses annoying, lazy shortcuts, such as too much dialogue in all the wrong places. (Characters abruptly continue conversations begun hours earlier.) Even his camera setups are so routine that it’s possible to guess how each entire scene will play out. (He foreshadows an explosion by switching camera focus from a face to a blank wall.)
Though The Counterfeiters does indeed contain an amazing story, it is by no means a good film; it’s proof that one element does not automatically translate into the other. A story can be good just laying on a page, but to make a great film requires skill, talent, creativity, artistry and other intangibles that Ruzowitzky clearly doesn’t possess.
The Counterfeiters
**
Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Martin Brambach
Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
Rated R