TREASURE, Germany, 2024. Starring Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry. Directed by Julia von Heinz. 111 minutes. Rated M.
‘Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.’ And the treasure of the title? For the middle-aged woman it is wanting to visit her family’s homeland and get an appreciation for her Jewish heritage. For the man who had survived the WWII concentration camps treasure is slightly different. But for both, it involves a quest to revisit Poland.
Set in 1991, Treasure is based on a novel by Lily Brett, who grew up in Melbourne, but lives now in the US. She has been a candidate for many of the Australian literature of awards, including the Miles Franklin, and was awarded an AO in 2021. In the film is dedicated to the memory of her father (with a photo of father and daughter at the final credits).
There will be a variety of responses to this journey back to Poland. The older generation with its sad memories and the reality of the Holocaust and the Jewish genocide, a younger generation wanting to understand the past better. And there is the 21st-century audience, now decades-distanced from the events but wanting to know, understand and appreciate more.
This means the effect on a range of audiences has been wider than the film critics, who have been rather severe on the screenplay, the casting, the performances, would have us believe.
The performances are striking in their way, though both father and daughter are not immediately likeable are difficult to identify with. Dunham is Ruth, middle-aged, music journalist in the US. She married to enable her husband to get a green card, and then divorced. Her mother died a year earlier and has a difficult relationship with her father. She is quite idiosyncratic, even carrying her breakfast cereals with her . . . A difficult role, but more immediate audience sympathy for her than for her father.
He is Edek (Fry), brilliant, domineering and controlling with a broad smile and flashing money to get his way. He is critical of his daughter and her life, casual in his approach to this journey back into the past. In fact, he rather wants to avoid going back to where he grew up in Lodz, wary of a trip to Auschwitz. But, this is Ruth’s quest and, eventually, they do go to see the family factory, now dilapidated, go back to the apartment block where the family lived, the new occupants apprehensive about being evicted, lying about the apartment being empty when they moved in, but the gradual discovery that they did have silver, crockery, coats from the past – and Ruth, desperate for mementos, bargaining to buy them.
And the visit to Auschwitz is important. Edek finding the grown-over rail tracks where they disembarked, visiting the site of the hut where he lived, the workplaces.
While there are criticisms of the performances, of the relationship between Dunham and Fry on screen, and of the screenplay, there is still value for a 21st-century audience sharing this journey of memory, journey of discovery.
Bleeker Street Films
Released 18 July