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'The Counterfeiters'

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BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

February 22, 2008

So here are your options if it's World War II Germany and you're a Jewish master counterfeiter named Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics): Either you agree to use your talents to help your Nazi captors print phony U.S. dollars and British pounds in a plot to ruin Allied finances or be tortured, starved and put to death with most other concentration camp inmates.

In "The Counterfeiters," fashioned from actual historic events by Austrian writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky, Salomon's choice would seem to be made easier by the relative comfort offered at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to printers, graphic designers, bankers and other prisoners used by the Germans for their "Operation Bernhard" scheme. Oh, the guards still slap them around once in a while and Salomon has to submit to the humiliation of being urinated on for being a "dirty Jew." But the sheets are clean, the soup isn't watery and there's beautiful music to listen to on the phonograph as the inmates work their illicit magic.

Survival is Salomon's primary directive and it's enough justification for him, if not for a Marxist printer (August Diehl), whose wife is still trapped in Auschwitz. Or, for that matter, for those, including the audience, who are made aware at intervening points of the agony and torment imposed upon those camp inmates who are of no use to Commandant Burger (Devid Striesow) and his superiors.

Ruzowitzky, whose movie has been nominated for this year's best foreign language film Academy Award, wisely knows he doesn't have to be overly emphatic in orchestrating the tension of both the moral conundrum and the always uncertain fate of the inmates.

Still, it's the little things in "The Counterfeiters" that illuminate its passage; like the withering glare aimed by a sybaritic blonde at Salomon when she finds out he's Jewish or the chillingly casual way Nazi goons dispense with their prisoners. The movie's biggest asset is Markovics, whose Salomon struggles to cling to his deadpan savoir faire in the midst of unimaginable horror.

THE COUNTERFEITERS (R). Inspired by a true story, this Oscar-nominated German-language film chronicles how a Jewish criminal (Karl Markovics) was compelled by his Nazi captors to help print funny money for their war effort. Written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. In German with English subtitles. 1:39 (violence, sexual situations, nudity). At the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema, Manhattan. Coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre.