Film

A scene from Stefan Ruzowitsky’s “The Counterfeiters.”

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

‘The Counterfeiters’:
Moral Ambiguity
And The Shoah.

Given the proliferation of films about the Shoah since the 1960s, it is hard to believe that there are any stories left untold. Of course, given the enormity of the population affected by the Nazis’ attempt to murder the entirety of European Jewry and their malevolent intentions towards anyone who opposed them, there will be many more stories to tell. But few of those stories are as remarkable as that of Operation Bernhard, the subject of Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters,” the Austrian nominee for the foreign-language Academy Award.
Operation Bernhard was something of a masterstroke, a cunning plan to undermine the economic well being of Great Britain and the United States by flooding the world with perfect

counterfeits of pound notes and dollars. In an irony that must have seemed particularly amusing to the leaders of the Third Reich, the men who were to carry out this plan were Jewish prisoners transferred from the death camps and elsewhere to a secret barracks in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Adolf Burger, a trained printer, a Jew and an active member of the Communist anti-Nazi resistance, survived to write a memoir of these events, and his book served as a source for Ruzowitzky’s screenplay.
With one major change.
“The one thing I was interested in was [the character of] Sally, the professional counterfeiter who oversaw much of the operation,” Ruzowitzky explained last week. “We’ve heard Burger’s story before. But here is this jailbird manipulating, betraying, conniving — a crook. That’s a completely different perspective.”
Ruzowitzky knew that by focusing on a morally ambiguous protagonist, a Jewish criminal, he was skating out where the ice is very thin.
“I was aware from the start that this was a sensitive issue, that it was possible to bring across the wrong message,” he admitted.
He was fortunate. He had Adolf Burger himself as a script consultant and frequent visitor to the set.
“He was very open,” Ruzowitzky recalled. “It’s his mission to tell his story, and it was a very good experience to have him there. But he felt it wasn’t important that he be the center of the narrative.”
As a result, “The Counterfeiters” is more complex in its morality than most Holocaust dramas, by turns poignant, suspenseful and frequently bleakly funny. Karl Markovics’ performance as Salomon Sorowitsch, “Sally,” is remarkably nuanced and, by pitting the idealistic Burger against the cynical Sorowitsch, Ruzowitzky actual ennobles Burger even more than a conventional plaster-saint portrait would have. Besides being an excellent film in its own right, “The Counterfeiters” is also a vivid reminder that important stories still remain to be told about the Shoah.
“The Counterfeiters” opens on Feb. 22 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the Angelika Film Center.

‘Then She Found Me’:
Helen Hunt Does Jewish.

Although her film and
television career stretches all the way back to the age of 8, Helen Hunt is probably best remembered as Paul Reiser’s better half on “Mad About You,” where she was the most charming embodiment of the blonde WASP goddess. So it might come as a surprise to some to learn that Hunt’s father, director Gordon Hunt, is halachically Jewish.
“My father’s mother, my grandmother, was Jewish,” she explained in a phone interview from Los Angeles last month. “Her name was Rothenberg. And David Steinberg once told me that I was the most Jewish girl he’d ever met.”
If further proof is needed, look no further than Hunt’s feature directorial debut, “Then She Found Me,” which opens theatrically in April. Based on the novel by Elinor Lipman, the film deals sympathetically with the inner dynamics of a middle-class Jewish family facing a series of crises. Hunt, who wrote the screenplay, directed and stars in the film, made a point of not only retaining the family’s Jewishness but of making their observance a key part of the family members’ lives.
“They are Jewish in the book. Why would I change that?” Hunt asks earnestly. “In the novel the protagonist’s adoptive parents are Holocaust survivors. If you want to do shorthand in a film for an adopted daughter, what could be better than having me as Ben Shenkman’s sister? And it’s a comedy. I’ve grown up with Jewish humor all around me. If you want to make the film funnier, you don’t make the family Presbyterians.”
Intriguingly, Hunt’s adaptation drops much of the Lipman novel, a tale of an abandoned wife — her adopted parents dead — who is seized upon by her dotty biological mother, a local TV talk-show host. Where Lipman was interested in the relationship of newfound mother and daughter (and stepfather), Hunt is more concerned with the constellation of relationships surrounding April, the daughter. So the film is mostly about her ex-husband, new boyfriend and brother and the series of betrayals of which she is either the victim or the perpetrator.
“The mother-daughter story is in spirit like the novel, but everything else is invented,” she explained. “I worked on the script for a long time, with a lot of soul-searching and reworking. As soon as I made those big changes [from Lipman’s book], it became my own.
“The movie behind the movie is about betrayal with a capital B. A movie has to have a sentence about what it’s about. For ‘Then She Found Me’, the sentence would have to be ‘You can’t really love till you‘ve made peace with betrayal.’ I spent a lot of time with a close friend who’s a rabbi, a lot of time trying to get it right. And I realized that we are all trying to make peace in a world that’s as fraught as this one is.”
So even though she made some radical changes to Elinor Lipman’s novel, Helen Hunt certainly didn’t betray it.
“Then She Found Me” opens in New York on April 25.
‘My Father, My Lord’:
A modern-day binding
of Isaac.

When David Volach’s first
feature, “My Father, My Lord,” won the prize for best fiction feature at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, I doubt if Volach was much happier than this critic. As I said when it played the festival last year, “Every once in a while a film takes you completely by surprise. It grabs you by the lapels, gets in your face and says, ‘This is very important.’ ... ‘My Father, My Lord’ is just such a film.” And when it won that award, it was only a matter of time before the film was acquired for North American distribution.
Happily, “My Father, My Lord” will be opening in New York in April, and now anyone who is interested in the future of Jewish films can see it.
“My Father, My Lord” justifies such praise by its quiet intelligence and its extraordinary attention to the expressive use of the mundane detail. Volach claims as his primary influence the brilliant Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, best known here for his “Three Colors” trilogy and “The Double Life of Veronique.” Volach has said that “My Father, My Lord” is an appreciative response to the first of the 10 telefilms in Kieslowski’s “Dekalog,” a contemporary reworking of the Binding of Isaac in response to the injunction, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
Volach’s approach to the story is as oblique as Kieslowski’s. He focuses on an older haredi couple — a highly respected rabbi (Assi Dayan) and his wife (Sharon Hacohen Bar), whose only child is a sweet, daydreaming boy (Elan Griff). Although father and son clearly dote on one another, the rigorous strictness of the father’s piety creates a small but discernible gap between them, while the unquestioning warmth of his mother’s love creates a total devotion. Finally, on a summer vacation trip to the Dead Sea, tragedy strikes the family, leaving them irretrievably shattered.
Volach, himself one of 19 children from a fervently Orthodox family, left because he wanted to pursue a life of the imagination and aesthetics, something he did not feel he could do in the haredi world in Jerusalem. As a result, he brings a gravity and sincerity to his approach to depicting that world. Only 73 minutes long, “My Father” tells its story simply and quickly. But like Kieslowski, Volach tells it with a slow-building intensity that is based on the accretion of seemingly irrelevant detail and a slow narrative rhythm that is seductive and satisfying. He has the Polish master’s sense of the mysteriousness of existence, the precariousness of human life and the arbitrariness of death. And like Kieslowski, he is perfectly willing to let his camera just run when a moment of sheer mystery occurs.
For the past few months, I have been slowly formulating an idea of what the film aesthetic of a spiritual Judaism would look like. Although it is hardly the only answer, “My Father, My Lord” is definitely one answer, and a profoundly moving one.
“My Father, My Lord” will open theatrically in April at a date and theater to be announced.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization