Cioma Schönhaus’ story of being a young Jewish Berliner in the early 1940s is truly remarkable, included in the 2017 docudrama The Invisibles (Die Unsichtbaren – Wir wollen leben) and now mined by Maggie Peren for her handsomely made but tonally flat The Forger. Part of the problem is that Peren doesn’t know how to jive the jocular tone of Schönhaus’ memoir with the atmosphere of fear around him, resulting in a dissatisfying Third Reich drama rich in production design yet curiously light on tension. It’s hard to imagine what kind of theatrical life The Forger can have given how many period reproductions are already out there.
Berlin in 1942 wasn’t exactly a bed of roses, especially for those Jews who managed to stick it out that long. Cioma (Louis Hofmann, The White Crow) works in a munitions factory and thus is considered essential labor, unlike his parents and grandmother who were shipped off to Sobibór and Majdanek; their absence, not to mention their certain fate, doesn’t occupy much of his thoughts, at least not in this film. He’s allowed to stay in a small part of the large family apartment whose contents are marked for state appropriation, but together with his friend Det Kassriel (Jonathan Berlin) he hatches a scheme to sell items in exchange for ration coupons. That doesn’t go over well with widowed building manager and quintessential Nazi hausfrau Mrs. Peters (Nina Gummich), eager to proclaim her loyalty to the Party while only too happy to do some of her own appropriation.
In one of many murky plot points, Cioma meets with Jonas Kaufmann (Marc Limpach), a humorless lawyer with a mission to distribute fake id cards to Germans needing to flee the country. Cioma has a background in graphic design so he’s given a try-out as a forger, but Kaufmann is unimpressed by the work and even more displeased by the young man’s cavalier attitude. Why was Cioma ever trusted for this assignment anyway? Meanwhile, the coupons he and Det managed to amass after selling off the family possessions allow them to live rather well, especially once they replicate a couple of navy dress uniforms and impress Berliners with their supposed duty to the Fatherland, not to mention their non-Jewish good looks.
Cioma’s laid-back approach to life gets him fired from the munitions factory: instead of turning up for work he’s cavorting with a woman going under the name Gerda (Luna Wedler) who makes ends meet by discreetly turning tricks. Without that job he’s without his exemption, which means deportation to a concentration camp, so he finds new places to sleep and returns to Kaufmann, begrudgingly impressed with Cioma’s improvement as forger and in need of a good worker to produce faked ids.
The film aims to find a balance between Cioma’s recklessness and the chilling pall of fear felt throughout the city, where people are judged by the enthusiasm with which they return a “Heil Hitler!” and being without the right id card means certain arrest. Looking back, it’s extraordinary that Cioma was so careless, absent-mindedly leaving important documents in the wrong places and boldly relying for survival on the stupidity of low-ranking officials and informants, together with their terror of censure. He had phenomenal luck and gumption which, combined with youthful high spirits, saw him through the war (the real Cioma ultimately escaped to Switzerland and died in 2015).
Unfortunately Peren (Color of the Ocean) rarely captures that tension between man and environment – perhaps Cioma’s way of making everything seem so easy captivated her to such a degree that she lost a sense of just how bad things were. There’s hardship depicted but it’s all rather superficial, apart from the occasional bone-chilling cold. There’s no sense of dread at the fate of more than 60,000 Jews deported from Berlin. None of Cioma’s losses leave any psychological residue, and while the memoir may indeed convey that impression, he’d have to have been a sociopath to come through these experiences unmarked. The closing minutes encapsulate the problem to a T: final texts reveal the fate of family and friends like Det and Kaufmann, murdered in Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and other camps, but when the words fade a bouncy jazz tune accompanies the remaining credits, as if bothersome downbeat history needs to be pushed aside so the audience can leave with a spring in their step. Most of The Forger unspools indoors, impressively kitted out in period style thanks to Eva-Maria Stiebler’s exacting production design, offset by warm low-watt golden lighting.
Director: Maggie Peren
Screenplay: Maggie Peren, based on the memoir Der Passfälscher by Cioma Schönhaus
Cast: Louis Hofmann, Jonathan Berlin, Luna Wedler, Nina Gummich, André Jung, Marc Limpach, Yotam Ishay, Luc Feit, Jeanne Werner, Joscha Schönhaus, Sina Reiß, Stephanie Stremler, Marie Jung
Producers: Alexander Fritzemeyer, Martin Kosok
Executive producer: Sophie Cocco
Cinematography: Christian Stangassinger
Production design: Eva-Maria Stiebler
Costume design: Diana Dietrich
Editing: Robert Sterna
Music: Mario Grigorov
Sound: Yves Bémelmans
Production companies: DREIFILM, Amour Fou Luxembourg, Network Movie Film-und Fernsehproduktion, ZDF/Arte
World sales: Beta Cinema
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale Special)
In German
111 minutes