Music for Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters: Music from the Motion Picture
Milan Records

This year’s Oscar nominated original scores were a particularly dreary, unremarkable lot. Perhaps the most effect movie music of the year was actually ineligible, as a good portion was not originally composed for the film. While Marius Ruhland did compose some original themes and cues, the soundtrack of The Counterfeiters, winner of the Academy Award for best foreign language film, is dominated by the haunting tangos of Hugo Diaz.

Director Stefan Ruzowitzky happened to have the music of the Argentinean harmonica player recommended to him while he was making the film and thought it was a perfect fit for the lead character, Salomon Sorowitch, based on the real-life Salomon Smolianoff. It seemed particularly fitting because Smolianoff actually relocated to Argentina sometime after his liberation from the camp.

Sorowitch is a survivor and a man of the underworld. As a result, he never wears his emotions on his sleeve. As played by Karl Markovics, Sorowitch brings to mind a lightweight boxer, maintaining a shrewdly cold exterior, while projected to sense of potential danger. However, despite his criminal success, he remains Jewish, subject to all the same German prejudices and hatreds every Jew in straight society must endure. The tango themes associated with his character tap into that sense of sorrow that a character like Sorowich refuses to outwardly express. The music of Diaz actually helps Markovics establish the interior turmoil of the steely counterfeiter. They also contribute to the appropriately modest emotional pay-off granted through the film’s framing sequences. In short, Diaz’s music makes the film better.

Diaz in fact, should be better known in America. He was a master of many forms of Argentinean music, not simply the tango, and was a friend jazz harmonica players like Toots Thielemans and Larry Adler. Each of his selected performances has an elegantly stark beauty, with “Man a Mano” and “Silencio” being perfect introductory and concluding themes, respectively.

Of Ruhland’s themes, most are of the emotional helper variety, perfectly effective in the film, but not so interesting independently. Probably the foreboding “Burger’s Secret” holds up on its own the most successfully, but it is hardly required listening.

The balance of the selections consists of the light operetta records so beloved by the National Socialists, which they would actually play for the counterfeiters as a form of positive reinforcement. Whatever their relative merits, knowing the privileged position some of these artists held under the regime leaves one cold to hear them now. For instance, Belgian tenor Marcel Wittrisch, here represented with “Nur fur Natur” and “Wei Mein Ahnl Zwanzig Jahr,” also recorded something called “God Bless Our Fuhrer.” However, within the context of the film on-screen, the chosen selections work effectively.

Counterfeiters is a great film, highly recommended. After seeing it, the tangos of Diaz probably sound even better, whereas the opposite is true for the operetta. Even apart from post-viewing reactions, the soundtrack CD is a mixed bag stylistically. However, Diaz’s tangos are a highlight that will hopefully reach a wider audience now.

Academy Award Nominee: The Counterfeiters

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is the classic game theory problem in which the most favorable collective result for prisoners is to cooperate together, but the dominant strategy for each is to cooperate with their jailers, inevitably leading to the least optimal combined result. Austria’s Academy Award nominated best foreign language film, The Counterfeiters, can be considered a tragically real historical application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a concentration camp setting, which would have wider repercussions on the outcome of WWII.

Counterfeiters dramatizes the historical events surrounding Operation Bernard, considered the largest counterfeiting project ever, organized by the Germans in the waning months of the war as a desperate attempt to undermine the economies of the Allied nations. It relied on the labor and expertise of specially selected Jewish concentration camp prisoners, led by notorious forger Salomon Sorowitch, based on the real-life Salomon Smolianoff.

Sorowitch is a survivor, so he is willing to put his talents to work for his National Socialist captors, to earn a temporary reprieve from the gas chambers and receive relatively improved living conditions in the counterfeiters’ “Golden Cage.” However, at least one colleague refuses ignore the ethical implications of their project. Adolf Burger, a printer mourning his wife murdered at Auschwitz, repeatedly sabotages efforts to forge the American dollar. (Years later Burger would write The Devil’s Workshop, the book on which the film was based.)

Clearly, the counterfeiters were facing a terrible dilemma. If they cooperate, they temporarily prolong their lives and enjoy small privileges, like better rations and unlikely enough, a ping-pong table. Yet, by doing so, they prolong the war and help finance the National Socialist death machine. Of course, if caught sabotaging the operation, they would surely face summary execution.

It is tough moral predicaments like these that might make some viewers uncomfortable. Unlike many Holocaust films, in Counterfeiters much of the horror of the Sachsenhausen camp happens off-screen—literally walled off from the characters in Block 19, and by extension the audience. Of course, the inhumanity and casual cruelty of their captors periodically intrudes into the Golden Cage in some disturbing scenes. In many ways, it is a cold slap-in-the-face of a movie that does not offer easy answers or pat sentimental endings.

At one point, one artist-turned-forger complains to Sorowitch that he cannot find any color in the camp. That is certainly true of director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s production and the washed out look of Benedict Neuenfels’ cinematography as well. However, the use of Marius Ruhland’s melancholy tango themes lends an inspired texture to the film. In many ways, the film is like its protagonist, cerebral but very intense.

Karl Markovics has a real challenge in the coldly analytical Sorowitch, but he makes the character fascinating to watch, as the career criminal develops an increasing sense of responsibility for the men under his charge. The rest of the cast is at least adequate, but it really is Sorowitch’s film. Counterfeiters is not Life is Beautiful and it is not Schindler’s List. It might actually be closer akin to The Pawnbroker, as a story about the costs of surviving. Counterfeiters is a smart film that is definitely recommended to those who do not require nice, safe formula devices in their cinema. It opens February 22nd in New York.