Some movies rest on an actor's face, and "The Counterfeiters" has a great one. Karl Markovics has knocked around the Austro-German movie scene for 15 years, first coming to fame supporting a police dog on a popular Austrian TV show called "Kommissar Rex." He has the weary look of a man relegated to playing brutes and morticians; with his skewed nose and long, flat shoebox head, he appears to have been repeatedly hit in the face with a shovel. He doesn't look happy about it, either.
In "The Counterfeiters," those cauterized features and the talent behind them have been put to the test of playing Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, the finest banknote forger in pre-World War II Berlin. There's a back story to Sally we never hear. We know he's originally from Russia and that he's a trained artist. We know the Great War was bad for him and that, in his words, he "had a family, once." The face does the rest, shoving sympathy away.
Sally's also Jewish, not that it means anything to him, even after the Nazis send him to the Mauthausen concentration camp. "I'm me, and the others are the others," he says - this movie's version of Bogart's "I stick my neck out for nobody" in "Casablanca." The forger's professional pride extends to the green triangle on his jacket that marks him as a "habitual criminal," not just a garden-variety Jew.
When an SS officer named Herzog (David Striesow) - the former police detective who arrested him - approaches Sally with a little counterfeiting project for the Third Reich, he accepts the job with dead eyes, but you can tell his heart's beating again. The film loosely follows the true story of Operation Bernhard, the biggest counterfeiting ring in history. The Nazis' aim was to flood Great Britain with fake pounds and bring down the economy; if that worked, the US dollar would be next.
Adapted from a book by Adolf Burger and written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, "The Counterfeiters" is slick, exciting, emotionally trenchant - well done all around. It's the kind of expertly produced Euro-cinema mea culpa tailored for Oscar, and in fact the film captured the best foreign language award two weeks ago. In intent and impact, it's very much this year's "The Lives of Others" - another tale of a compromised man forced to confront his larger historical complicity.
At first, though, the film gets off on the sheer scope and surrealism of the undertaking. Sally and other specialists, most of them Jews, are sent to Sachsenhausen, where they're isolated from the other camp inmates behind tall wooden walls (the screams still come through, though). They get clean sheets, real food, cigarettes. Real clothes, too, taken from the dead at Auschwitz. One man, a zealous young printer named Burger (August Diehl), refuses to put them on, but Sturmbannfuhrer Herzog lets it go. He's a modern man, "interested in managing people - that's where the future lies."
"The Counterfeiters," then, is a drama of site-specific morality - about where a man decides to stand when hell has no signposts. There are idealists like Burger, who quickly becomes the annoying conscience of the group, and there are those who will do anything to survive, like a skinny whiner named Zilinski (Andreas Schmidt). There are born victims like a tubercular kid named Karloff (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and born leaders like the hulking, joke-telling Laube (Viet Stubner). There are the Germans, who are the devil no matter how many cigarettes they hand out.
And there's Sally, who could go the way of Alec Guinness in "The Bridge On the River Kwai," aiding the enemy because he's aroused by the art of the thing. "Counterfeiters" piles on factoids so bizarre they defy belief - when the forgery team does well, they're rewarded with . . . a ping-pong table - and the juggling act turns taut and paralyzing, especially once the men of Operation Bernhard realize they're essentially funding the German war effort in its waning days. Himmler is very pleased, they're told, even as the heroes stall creating the perfect dollar. Do they sabotage their own plates and sacrifice themselves? What good is keeping yourself alive if the work kills others?
Ruzowitzky puts too many characters into play, and "The Counterfeiters" occasionally turns cluttered when it should be streamlined; he wants to give us the whole story and that story seen through the eyes of one fictional character. Lucky for him those eyes belong to Markovics, who signals Sally's increasing distress by lowering his eyelids from half-mast to three-quarters.
The film keeps returning to that inscrutable Easter Island head, though, searching for signs of life. The world war in this man's soul is between art and other people, and both take a second place to money until the film's quiet, thoroughly satisfying final scene. After all he has been through, Sally Sorowitsch at last cleans himself out.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
