Treasure, directed by Julia von Heinz, is a moving and often surprisingly funny character-driven story of intergenerational Holocaust trauma, which opened in theaters around Israel on Thursday (June 13).
Based on the novel Too Many Men by Lily Brett, von Heinz’s new film has a dream cast. Edek, a Polish Holocaust survivor, is played by British actor/director/author Stephen Fry, who has appeared in such films as Peter’s Friends, Wilde, and Gosford Park. His daughter, Ruth, who insists on schlepping her father back to Poland to confront his past, is portrayed by Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO series Girls.
Fry and Dunham might seem to be a very odd couple, since he generally plays quintessentially British intellectuals and she will be forever known as the outspoken and abrasive but honest and self-deprecating Hannah Horvath from Girls. But they have great on-screen rapport, which makes their on-screen relationship especially vivid, and their different accents and styles work well in creating the feeling of cultural and generation gaps.
Ruth, a journalist who grew up in the US, is of course completely Americanized, while Edek, who survived the Holocaust and managed to run a successful business in the US, will never lose his accent and his Polish-Jewish perspective. Ruth has grown up fighting to understand the truth about what her parents went through. We’ve all known families like this one, but it’s rare that we’ve seen them portrayed on screen with this level of loving detail, which creates a feeling of authenticity.
An authentic family portrayal
SET IN Poland in 1991, the film starts after Edek shows up a day late, having managed to lose Ruth in a New York airport. Only a little sheepish, he tells her he went to McDonald’s for “the hunger,” one of the many affectionately observed malapropisms that pepper his speech. When he poses for photos, for example, he says, “the cheese.”
It’s clear that he didn’t want to come, but Ruth pushed him. Her mother died of cancer and she just got divorced from a man her father adored; now she urgently feels the need to understand her father, as well as the past that no one talked about.
Edek, who has great charm but can be exasperatingly obtuse, stays busy chatting up everyone they meet and prefers to visit places like the Chopin Museum than to see his family’s former home or the grounds of Auschwitz. This drives Ruth crazy: a workaholic, she has put her faith in this trip, determined that it will be a breakthrough in her communication with her father and will help her deal with all her problems, including an eating disorder. If he doesn’t cooperate and open up, she can’t check it off her list.
The problems between parent and child play out in the shadow of the Holocaust, which complicates every moment. When they get to the apartment of Edek’s family, now occupied by a Polish one with young children and little money who can’t even afford to heat it properly, Edek tries to remain neutral. But when he sees his mother’s tea service in the hands of this family, something breaks in him.
Ruth is determined to get the tea set back, but he urges her to give up on it, still afraid that the Poles will murder them, which happened to many Jews who tried to return to their homes after the war. Ruth returns to the apartment to buy it back at an absurdly inflated price, along with other personal items from Edek’s family, as the hostile but impoverished family accept her money resentfully.
The sequences involving the apartment seamlessly combine the dynamics between Edek and Ruth, the tragedy of the Nazi slaughter, and the imperfect reality of impoverished Poles taking advantage of what Jews left behind.
THROUGHOUT THE movie, there are many moments like this, often mixed with humor. When they finally get to Auschwitz, Edek doesn’t stop being Edek. When he learns that survivors are allowed to travel around the campsite in golf carts – as opposed to ordinary visitors, who must walk – he says: “That’s something, at least.”
In addition to its emotional side, the movie has meticulous production design, which brings Poland of this period to life, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Poles they meet along the way become characters on their journey, reminding us that the world is constantly changing and nothing happens in a vacuum. Zbigniew Zamachowski, who appeared in several movies by Kryzysztof Kieslowski, has the most significant role as a driver who becomes their guide.
But it is essentially a two-character story, and Fry and Dunham give it their all. Both have said in interviews that they drew on their own family’s Jewish background to prepare for their roles. Anyone who found Dunham annoying in Girls will not enjoy her work here either, and I can imagine some becoming impatient with the eating-disorder storyline, which could have descended into a cliché, but which makes sense in the context of the plot. Fry gives what may be his best, and certainly his warmest, movie performance.
Treasure is the third part of director von Heinz’s “Aftermath Trilogy,” which includes And Tomorrow the Entire World and Hanna’s Journey (which takes place mainly in Israel) and which explore the legacy of the Nazis on post-war Europe. Like her previous films, Treasure is a very particular story that will evoke universal emotions in audiences.