Name: The Money Maker
Director: Jean-Paul Salomé
Genre: History, Drama, Crime
Released: 2026-01-14T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 128 min
Cast: Reda Kateb, Sara Giraudeau, Bastien Bouillon, Quentin Dolmaire, Pierre Lottin

There is a strain of French cinema that regards the criminal less as a problem to be solved than as a craftsman to be studied, and Jean-Paul Salomé’s new film settles comfortably into that tradition. Its subject is a forger, a Polish engineer washed up in France who discovered that his hands could turn out banknotes more convincing than the ones the state itself printed. The film is not, in the end, interested in the crime. It is interested in the paradox at its centre: a man whose masterpiece could never be signed, whose only true admirers were the police assigned to end him.

The story is real, or close enough to be unnerving. An émigré with no papers to his name and no way to patent the inventions crowding his head, Bojarski retreated to a garden shed and there produced francs of a precision that left the Banque de France struggling to tell his notes from its own. He kept the enterprise hidden even from his household, a second existence folded neatly into the rituals of an ordinary family. Salomé builds the picture around that concealment, and around the mounting fixation of Commissaire Mattei, the officer for whom the case slowly stops being police work and becomes something nearer to a calling.

Salomé has worked this seam before. After ‘La Syndicaliste,’ his study of a whistle-blower ground down by corporate machinery, he again fastens on a real figure who lives at an angle to the system and trusts the reconstruction to carry the moral argument. The period — the France of the postwar decades, its zinc counters, workshops and grey ministries — arrives without nostalgia, treated as a texture rather than a postcard. He films the forgery itself with the concentration a weaker movie would spend on a heist: the plates, the rag paper, the ink, the exasperating patience of coaxing a watermark into being.

The real Bojarski worked at his trade for the better part of two decades, and the film honours the sheer duration of the deception — the way a fraud sustained that long stops being a caper and becomes a life. What the Banque de France finally confronted was not a gang but a lone technician whose patience outlasted every method sent against him, and Salomé lets that asymmetry set the tempo. The state has laboratories, archives, manpower; the forger has a shed, a loupe and time. That the contest stays taut across two hours is a matter of direction, not incident.

Reda Kateb gives Bojarski a monkish stillness, the absorption of an artisan who has found the single thing he does better than anyone alive and cannot make himself stop. It is a performance assembled from restraint, and it holds the whole film upright. Facing him, Bastien Bouillon — whose obsessive investigator in ‘The Night of the 12th’ has not yet faded from memory — plays Mattei as a mirror rather than a foil, two perfectionists circling one object from opposite sides. Sara Giraudeau, as the wife kept in ignorance, supplies the domestic gravity that keeps the caper from floating off into pure ingenuity.

What gives the film its architecture is the duel, and Salomé stages it as a rhyme instead of a chase. The editing sets the forger’s meticulous solitude against the policeman’s methodical circling until the two rhythms begin to echo one another. Here is the auteurist pleasure of the thing: counterfeiter and detective are two conjugations of the same verb, two men bent by an identical devotion, and the film understands the joke well enough not to explain it.

That understanding is also the film’s exposure. The counterfeiter-as-artist conceit is seductive and a little self-flattering; it coaxes an audience into admiring the craft and quietly mislaying the fraud — the debased currency, the ordinary people handed worthless paper. Salomé largely declines to canonise his subject, yet the frame tilts toward romance, and anyone hoping for a harder accounting of what the forgery cost may find the picture more enamoured of its hero than inclined to interrogate him. Nor does it fully escape the pull of its genre. The cat-and-mouse scaffolding is elegant but well worn, and the resolution lands more or less where the form has always promised it would.

Reda Kateb as counterfeiter Bojarski in The Money Maker directed by Jean-Paul Salome (2026) — Reda Kateb in *The Money Maker* (2026)

None of which cancels the pleasure of watching a director this assured handle a story this improbable. Salomé has made the rare heritage thriller that trusts its audience to sit with process, to find suspense in a steady hand and a drying sheet of paper, and the film’s warm reception at home suggests that appetite is far from exhausted.

Bojarski’s story reached French cinemas at the start of the year and has since migrated to home viewing there; Spanish audiences meet it next, as ‘La copia perfecta,’ in the middle of July, with a German release, ‘Der perfekte Schein,’ following at the month’s end. No United States or United Kingdom theatrical date has yet been set — which leaves English-speaking viewers, fittingly, waiting on a man whose entire art lay in making people believe.