The Counterfeiters (2008)

"The Counterfeiters" won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film at the 2008 Oscars, and with good reason. The Holocaust drama from Austria plays against type by portraying a petty criminal, Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), swept up in the Nazi death machine. Sally is no saint ruined by evil. He's a damn crook.

Told in flashback style, we see Sally post-war at a seaside casino and then quickly rocket back to early 1930s Berlin as the Nazis gain power. Sally boozes, womanizes and makes his living through counterfeiting and forgeries. With Jews and others fleeing Nazis, business is quite good. A long night of sex (which he trades in order to forge a woman's passport) leads to him sleeping late at his cramped apartment/hideout, and the arrival of Nazi police and his capture.

Sorowitsch, ever the player, soon uses his artistic talents to make himself useful - and thereby stays alive - by painting portraits of Nazis and their families. Soon, however, he's tasked into heading the largest counterfeiting scheme in known history, forging the pound and then dollar so Nazi Germany can deal Britain and America deadly financial blow. In return, Sally is treated to shelter, food and clothing far better than any other camp prisoner. He goes with the scheme because keeps him alive, whereas some of his fellow Jewish prisoners/forgers know that success means a German victory. In a twisted twist, Sally seems obsessed with actually seeing if he can actually pull off the pound and then the dollar as mere art. But he knows who his masters are. Markovics constantly registers the internal struggle within Sally, as he must eventually pick a side.

It's a tough film to watch with its violence and depiction of suffering, but it's unforgettable, and Sally is as fascinating and complicated a character as I've ever seen on film. The depiction of the Nazis, including Sally's "boss" (Devid Striesow) also digs deep. In one key scene, the camp commander actually convinces himself that giving his charges a ping pong table as a gift is a blessed event. How Godless is that? It depicts the absolute immorality of the Third Reich -- that a simple ping pong table can make up for dead spouses, torture and suffering beyond compare. Yet, the charges actually use the table for sport. That's the dark beauty of this film, the ways a soul will shift, morph and adopt to the most heinous circumstances in order to survive. What Sally does post-war has some devastating humor and irony. A