My meandering through various submissions for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film continued with The Resistance Banker (original title Bankier von het Verzet, available on Netflix), submitted by the Netherlands, which tells the incredible, little-known, true story of two brothers who created and ran an underground bank in the country to finance the Resistance to the Nazi occupiers, eventually forging treasury bonds to keep their bank afloat. The story is the star here, told in an almost matter-of-fact way that might mute the emotional impact of what the brothers did, and the sacrifices they made, to help feed Dutch Jews in hiding and fund the national railroad strike, but an expert performance by Barry Atsma as the lead banker, Wally Van Hall, gives the film some pathos beneath the thriller at the surface.
Wally, given name Walraven, and his brother Gijs (Jacob Derwig) are both bankers in the Netherlands at the time of the invasion, and they’re approached near the start of the film by a Resistance member who asks for their help in financing the efforts to shelter Jews and fund the Resistance’s efforts. Wally jumps into the job, despite having a wife (Fockeline Ouwerkerk) and three young children, while Gijs is more cautious, and a bit closer to Meinoud van Tonnigen (Pierre Bokma), a Dutch collaborator who rose to run the Finance Ministry and the national bank under the occupying forces.
The film tells the story at a brisk pace, showing how the brothers built the underground organization, keeping meticulous records, and eventually built a process for forging bonds using government employees sympathetic to the Resistance to help them gain serial numbers and swap those bonds out for real ones that could then be called in for cash. The scheme eventually netted over 50 million guilders for the effort, over half a billion Euros in today’s money according to a note before the end credits. The bolder the underground bank became, the more the occupiers and van Tonnigen tried to find and stop them, and the more people they involved, the greater the chance became of someone finking or being captured and tortured for information – both of which eventually happen, although the bank managed to keep operating until the liberation of the country by Allied forces.
The van Halls put their own lives at risk to do this, powered by both a patriotic fervor and a horror at what they saw happening around them, with Wally depicted as the true believer and Gijs the more reticent of the two, sometimes to the point of reminding his brother that his family would be at risk if he were ever caught. There’s a framing device here of Gijs testifying after the war to a room of men in suits, with their roles revealed at the end of the movie, but Wally is the clear hero, and Atsma infuses the portrayal with the zealotry required for someone to undertake such a scheme, inviting torture and death if he should ever be caught, as well as the affection and pain of a man who flees from his own family partway through the war lest he be caught and put them in further danger. Atsma seems the best of all of the actors in the film at showing real emotion in his facial expressions and body language; almost every other male actor in the movie is restrained, even in distress, or seems to overexert himself to show emotion, while Atsma’s tonal shifts, even the abrupt ones, work naturally.
The Resistance Banker won the Golden Calf awards – the Dutch equivalent of the Oscars – for Best Picture, Best Actor for Atsma, Best Supporting Actress for Ouwerkerk, and Best Production Design, and won the Audience Award (I think by popular vote). The story is just tremendous, one I’d never heard before, and it seems from what I’ve read that the script hews largely to actual events (with one exception I could find – van Tonningen was already on the run by January/February 1945, so he couldn’t have met Wally in that time period). It has the feel of a great British historical spy film, which means that it’s also a bit removed, and very light on flash. If you know the real outcome, you have an idea of what’s coming, but how we get there, and how many near-misses the bankers seem to have had with exposure or arrest, is very compelling, with no lapse in tension or extraneous material here. It’s a quick two hours and a story that I think most people would appreciate. That probably wouldn’t be enough to distinguish it from the other candidates for the Oscar – it didn’t make the shortlist – but I’d find this easier to recommend to people than the mediocre Capernaum or the three-hour Never Look Away (which I haven’t seen yet, but three hours?).