The Counterfeiters & The Band's Visit

The face of The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is Karl Markovics, and he controls the film with expression ranging from sullen and dangerous, to sullen and passionate, to sullen and kind. Markovics plays Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, a Jewish counterfeiter interned in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen and forced to participate in Operation Bernhard, a Nazi effort to counterfeit first the British pound, then the U.S. dollar. Based on a true story, Counterfeiters has the neatness of a piece of moral fiction. Virtuously, Counterfeiters never sermonizes. Instead, moral questions are developed through juxtaposition of Sally with other characters—Sally and an innocent, Sally and a hero, Sally and a villain. I use labels like “hero” and “villain”, but nobody in Counterfeiters is exactly good or exactly evil. To say this another way, each characters actions can be questioned yet each character can also be viewed with sympathy. This is not to say that the Nazis' actions are forgivable, but like Peter Lorre's pedophile in M, here the villain becomes human. The images of Counterfeiters support this point—few color films more make the world look composed of shades of gray.

I've made Counterfeiters seem cold and intellectual, but it is an engaging, even entertaining, movie. Counterfeiters shares this quality with American Psycho, which I saw at a midnight showing directly after. Counterfeiters is so noble in intent, and American Psycho loses itself so easily in blood-slick play, I panicked when I realized how much greater a work than Counterfeiters I consider American Psycho. How can this be?

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The musical soundtrack to The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) is unusually sparse, especially for a film featuring musicians, so that when music is played it seems like a miracle. The Band's Visit is about finding such miracles in sparseness, though the plot concerns an Egyptian police band (really something more like a chamber orchestra) lost in Israel—a mistake in pronunciation leads to the stranding of the band in a remote Israeli town for one night. A great hearted film, humanistic in politics and loving of its characters, the unusual and foreign setup becomes relatable to us in far away San Francisco. In the magnificent finale, when the band's conductor raises his hand, I believed. I've never heard classical Arab musical compositions before, those in this film are beautiful.