The Counterfieter
Posted: 22 April 2008 08:30 PM   [ Ignore ]  
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Hi.  I recently saw the Oscar for foreign film winning the Counterfeiter and didn’t find it that penetrating to what is admittedly a difficult issue.  The drama centered around whether the grizzled Jewish master counterfeiter was going to rat out his friend the radical who was sabotaging the effort, a legit if subtle moral point but hard to bring the drama to a boil.  The film did try to play with counter stereotypes, the Jewish criminal, the nice Nazi (although that one has been overdone), the haughty Jewish aristocrat, and it had a great look but it needed less grabbing of all the typical Holocaust themes and more pondering one issue and charactar.  The most dramatic moment, I found, was at the end, when the other camp inmates took over and were going to kill the counterfeiters on the assumption they were Nazis, and they saved themselves by showing their arm numbers.  Supposedly from a true story but that provides no easy answers for dramaturge.

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