Treasure movie review: A Poignant story that fails to be entreating

This film is based on Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett’s 2001 novel ‘Too Many Men’ about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father’s tragic past

Film: Treasure
Cast: Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Andre Hennicke
Director: Julia von Heinz
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 111 min

This film is based on Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett’s 2001 novel ‘Too Many Men’ about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father’s tragic past. One of the book’s features involves a series of conversations between the daughter and the ghost of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hess.

The premise is simple. The child of two Auschwitz death camp survivors sets out on a journey to learn about her family. Ruth (Lena Dunham), an American journalist, plans a trip to her ancestral home in Poland. Her father  Edek (Stephen Fry) doesn’t want her to go alone and decides to join her. Ruth wants to visit the family home in Lodz where they were once a successful industrial family before the Nazi’s confiscated everything and sent Edek and his wife to Auschwitz. But Edek is wary of revisiting that agonising past. Edek doesn’t want to open the door to his harrowing experiences in Auschwitz but Ruth’s eagerness to understand her own history leads them both to a healing that is much-needed.

Though the story is complicated, heavy with sentiment and pathos, the narrative approach is not. The tone is both serious and lighthearted. It’s a slow burn and as an audience you are likely to feel every moment of the near two hour run time. The conversations, stilted yet  meaningful, tend to drag down the momentum. The performances feel stagey and the overall representation of tone and tenor fail to keep the interest going. The conversations about processing generational trauma are quite revealing though.

The pair travel through the country staying at low-rent hotels, squabbling about minor issues and eventually attaining a cathartic understanding of each other.

The treatment though is quite confounding.The leaden pace, uneven structure call attention to individual scenes. By the time the father and daughter come to terms with what happened, the  movie loses its potency. There are some interesting moments woven into the narrative with Fry and Dunham doing their best to generate effect. But the script fails to make it all worthy.

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