Edek (Stephen Fry) is a Holocaust survivor from Łódź who emigrated to America with his late wife after surviving the unfathomable horrors of Auschwitz. He’s loud, horny, and impossible to embarrass—the kind of guy who’ll happily sing karaoke in a crowded hotel bar, then flirt with half the women in the audience for an encore. His daughter Ruth (Lena Dunham) is a 36-year-old music journalist from New York whose biggest challenge in life was getting an interview with the Rolling Stones. She’s moody, stern, and cut off from the world in a way that doesn’t seem to be so much a symptom of her recent divorce as its potential cause.
As we follow these characters through their difficult but fun father-daughter journey back to Poland, it will become clear that Edek’s brilliance comes from the same thing as Ruth’s discontent: a complete break from their history personal. For Edek, who is determined to make this solemn return home a joyous holiday, this separation has been a deliberate act of self-preservation. For Ruth, whose father was never as open about his trauma, this separation was something of an unsolicited birthright.
During Julia von Heinz’s wounded but funny film “Treasure” (which so closely mirrors the plot and comic serial tone of Jesse Eisenberg’s sharper film “A Real Pain” that it positions both films in a very strange “Armageddon”/”Deep Impact” situation), these mismatched characters will be forced to reckon with the past in a way that redefines their relationships with each other in the present.
Adapted from Lily Brett’s 1999 autobiographical novel “Too Many Men,” “Treasure” is essentially an intergenerational story about the walls people build to protect themselves and others. More specifically, it’s a story about what happens when those walls grow so high that they threaten to block our loved ones on the other side, and about the difficult process required to dismantle them before it’s too late . Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to function more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham give their scenes a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters into their lives – the the former despite Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter despite the lack of humor Ruth developed in reaction to it.
The trip was definitely his idea. “Treasure” is set during the post-Soviet winter of 1991, when the fall of communism prompted large numbers of Polish Jews from around the world to visit their home country for the first time since the war – or ever. In 1939, there were more than three million Jews in the country; When Ruth and Edek arrive at Warsaw airport some 52 years later, there are fewer than 4,000 of them, and Ruth can’t even find the one she brought with her (“Never disappear again,” says (she to her father after he walks away in the airport, a revealing introduction that will resonate throughout the rest of the film).
Ruth has a detailed plan of what she would like to see and do over the next few days, while Edek has a general goal of modifying that plan as much as possible (“what Jew goes to Poland as a tourist?” he wonders). The friction between these strategies is evident before father and daughter even arrive at their hotel, as Ruth – a money pincher who insists they rely on public transport – blithely ignores why the noise of the silent brakes of a train could encourage his father to do crazy things. in a taxi instead (an awkward close-up of Fry’s grimacing face ensures that viewers are aware of what this film is doing long before the Holocaust is mentioned by name).
Of course, if Ruth doesn’t realize how difficult it must be for her father to return to a place haunted by so many of his ghosts (it is suggested that her parents were the only members of their family to survive the camps), This is largely because Edek – who never taught his daughter to speak Polish, forcing Ruth’s short-circuited brain to introduce itself with a “me llamo” at one point – didn’t failed to explain this to him, or share even the most basic details of his life. before the Holocaust. Even now, close to this terrible story, he prefers to talk to Ruth about more comfortable topics like her sex life and why things didn’t work out with her ex-husband Garth, whom Edek still loves like a son, and about to whom he wants to send a postcard from Auschwitz. Ruth, for her part, doesn’t understand why they sell them. “It’s not a museum, it’s a death camp!” she reprimands, as if her father ignores her (it’s hard to think of another phrase that so perfectly expresses how the dismay Dunham’s millennial joins in with the baby boomer anxiety she wallows in here).
Desperate to understand where her family tree should be and frustrated that her father would rather flirt with Miss Poland contestants than explain, Ruth spends much of her time at the hotel reading Nazi literature and – in a cry for help that demands a plot more attention than “Treasure” sees fit to give him – using a stick and a stroke to tattoo numbers on the underside of his forearm. Their various forays into the city also prove unsuccessful, as Edek inspires most of the locals they encounter to join his cause. He’s a hard man to resist, and Fry wields the character’s rumpled grandeur like a fatal charm offensive, until even his comically exaggerated accent seems like something Edek might have used as a tool to alleviate xenophobia whom he met as an immigrant to America.
His most important ally in his efforts to do nothing is Stefan, the taxi driver whom Edek babysits throughout the film. A gentle, smiling man played by “Three Colors: White” star Zbigniew Zamachowski, Stefan is the closest thing to a double-player of a third wheel, and the only major character this film allows to maintain a unexplored interiority. As Edek gives in to Ruth’s demands and reluctantly agrees to visit Łódź, and even pay a visit to the building where he grew up, Stefan begins to resemble a benevolent smuggler who shuttles his tickets back and forth across the River Styx.
His character helps personify the daily relationship between life and death in a country where people still live in the homes they “inherited” from Jewish families expelled during the war, and even continue to use the silverware that those families had to leave behind. Indeed, several of this film’s thorniest and most effective scenes show Ruth trading family heirlooms with the current occupant of Edek’s childhood apartment, a poor man petrified that she came to ask for the deed of ownership.
“Don’t take our home,” he begs, leaving Ruth to untangle an impossible knot of pity and indignation that makes her feel even more like a tourist in her ancestral homeland. This is followed by a very “girl” coded scene where she is exhausted and grossly overpays for kitchen utensils from an unhoused stranger. Are these her people, or is this the reason she doesn’t seem to have any? It’s hard to say in a country that has changed so much that Edek even knows where he is most of the time, even if certain details – like the exact layout of the barracks where he slept in Auschwitz – remain forever etched in his brain (That we are able to see the difference with our own eyes is due to Marcel Slawinski and Katarzyna Sobanska’s production design, which complements the tender gentleness of Daniela Knapp’s cinematography to render the film’s Polish locations and stand-ins Germans like nostalgic envelopes of memory).
The subplot involving his old apartment stands out from an episodic story that fails to generate much dramatic momentum and rarely bothers to try. “Treasure” might build to an ultra-concise climax that expresses all of its pent-up feelings with a few writerly sobs, but that climactic scene only feels like a concession because the rest of von Heinz’s film is so careful to respect the beginning and end. stop the pace of intergenerational communication. The way Edek always presents Ruth as a “famous” journalist. The midnight tête-à-tête about how no one cried at their mother’s funeral. THE two steps forward, one step back the kind of understanding Ruth gains from seeing Edek in a sticky situation when a fire alarm goes off at their hotel one night.
Von Heinz does an excellent job balancing the solemnity of the Holocaust with the (very Jewish) humor of family ties, but “Treasure” eschews the sentimental flippancy of “Life Is Beautiful” to embrace the madcap catharsis of “Little Miss Sunshine.” “. » The story’s biggest breakthrough ultimately comes through an act of cartoon theft that feels like a miracle cure to the problem this movie spends nearly two hours trying to diagnose.
What should seem like a happy compromise between Ruth’s historical curiosity and Edek’s desire to protect her only makes it seem like the mutual understanding these characters achieve was forced from the start. We don’t need to see the wall between Ruth and Edek crumble into dust to appreciate the work they’re doing to chip away at it, or to recognize how sharing the weight of our stories with each other – unspeakably sad as they did. could be – it’s the only way we’ll ever find the strength to carry our heaviest memories into the future.
Category B-
Bleecker Street will release “Treasure” in theaters on Friday, June 14.