Set in 1991, not long after it suddenly became much easier for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to visit sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-French co-production Treasure follows a father and daughter (played by Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham) making exactly this kind of voyage of remembrance. It’s adapted from the comic-tragic novel Too Many Men by Australian Lily Brett, and directed by German director Julia von Heinz, whose well-regarded previous two films (Nothing Else Matters and And Tomorrow the Entire World) also explore the aftermath of the Holocaust on later generations. So, as a package, Treasure would seem gifted with the raw material needed to make a compelling, inherently interesting work.
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Alas, the film is an inept, ill-made mess — or as my grandmother would call it, a mishegoss, so muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong. One can see the skeleton of a workable, potentially sturdy script, credited to von Heinz and her husband-collaborator John Quester, which finds comedy in the mismatched temperaments and desires of the two main characters.
Treasure
Genial, convivial Edek Rothwax (Fry) must have been a young man when he managed to make it out of Birkenau alive and left with his wife, who in the film has now been dead a year. Like many survivors of his generation, Edek just wants to let the past stay buried and live in the present. His anxiety-ridden, trauma-freighting daughter Ruth (Dunham), on the other hand, a music journalist who, as Edek keeps telling everyone, once interviewed the Rolling Stones, desperately wants to connect to her family’s tragic history. It was her idea that they make this trip to Poland to see the houses where Edek and his late wife grew up in Lodz, the factory that his family once owned, and then Auschwitz-Birkenau itself.
Naturally, the two of them are bickering from the moment the plane lands in Warsaw. Controlling Ruth seethes when Edek shuns the train tickets she’s pre-paid for — given his history, he unsurprisingly has a thing about trains — and instead makes friends with an affable cab driver, Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), who agrees to be their chauffeur for the whole trip.
I confess I have not read Brett’s book, but judging by what I can gather about it, a lot of the friction between the two main characters stems from the way Edek, who can speak fluent if rusty Polish, gets along with the locals while Ruth sees nothing but smiling anti-Semites all around her. It’s easy to imagine that this would have worked onscreen too, but instead something has gone awry with the rendering of the characters, as if the filmmakers and cast were afraid of making Ruth too unlikeable. So instead, there’s a heavy emphasis here on Ruth’s trauma, her bulimia and body issues. (True to the form she established on Girls, Dunham is unafraid to get semi-naked for the camera — you go, girl! Flash that flesh like you don’t give a f–k!) She has a weird need to spray money at every Polish person she meets, be they a poor market stallholder selling pigs’ feet or the descendants of the Poles who took possession of Edek’s family apartment (who sell back to her, at highly inflated prices, things Edek remembers belonging to his family).
As played here, Edek is similarly a muddle of contradictory impulses: He’s generous and friendly one minute to every Pole he meets, then suddenly bizarrely protective of Ruth and upset that she exposed herself to risk by going alone with a young male translator to meet the residents of his old house.
Of course characters, just like people in real life, can be a mass of contradictions. But somehow that complexity, that ability to contain completely opposed feelings at once, just doesn’t come across in Fry’s performance, just as Ruth’s contrariness feels gestural, poorly limned in Dunham’s. However much we all love Fry, a certified national treasure in the U.K., he’s never been an actor with much range, and he’s pretty much at his limit here. Admittedly, it’s deeply admirable that he put in the time to learn Polish well enough to speak a considerable amount throughout the film. But given that Edek moved to New York after the war, wouldn’t he have a New York accent in English instead of sounding like a British Pole from South Kensington?
It’s easy to get obsessed with these quibbles because it’s so hard to identify where it all goes wrong in Treasure. The supporting cast offer perfectly serviceable performances that serve the script’s clear aim to evoke the shame many Poles feel about the Holocaust, the widespread wish to not speak of it. And of course there’s the pervasive fear in the early 1990s that Jews would, rightly, come back and claim the property that was seized from their families. The production design and costume departments get the look and feel of early 90s post-Communist tackiness down to the most microcosmic level, from the mullet haircuts on the men to the brass palm plants in the hotel rooms and the way everyone smoked everywhere in those days.
Somehow poor casting and weak direction manage to flub a very promising premise, one that feels timely in the light of current debates around Jewish identity. It won’t help that Treasure is premiering on the festival circuit so soon after Jesse Eisenberg’s very similarly themed A Real Pain debuted in Sundance, winning strong acclaim. But the world should be big enough to contain more than one film about Jews revisiting the old country and feeling all kinds of feels. It’s just a shame this isn’t a better take on the material.
