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8 months ago
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When Australian writer Lily Brett published her novel Too Many Men in 2001, critics marvelled at the light, comic tone she had managed to strike in a novel about the lasting impact of the Holocaust, passed down from one generation to the next. Families have their customary jokes; they squabble over the dinner table; they may be funny characters but, underneath it all, there is a consciousness of pain. That’s not an easy balance to strike, as a writer or as an actor.
So when Julia Von Heinz came to adapt Too Many Men as a film – now called Treasure – she found an ostensible dream team in Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham, playing camp survivor Edek Rothwax and his wisecracking adult daughter Ruth on a homecoming trip to Poland. Here are two actors who are equally at home in comedy and drama, two actors who are also accomplished writers and could collaborate on developing their scenes, two actors who are, crucially, both Jewish. Best of all, they could be relied upon to be funny. When she first saw Fry and Dunham together, Von Heinz has said, they already looked like father and daughter.
Ruth Rothwax could have been written for Dunham: she is 36, divorced, a journalist who interviews celebrities, and a born-and-bred New Yorker. When the story begins, Ruth’s mother has been dead for a year. She and Edek were married when they were sent to their respective death camps; after the war ended and they found each other alive, they emigrated to America and put the past behind them. Ruth knows there is horror in that past but, equally, that this horror must never be discussed. It is only now that she feels the need to recover something of her family history, touring the Polish towns where they once lived. At the last, highly inconvenient moment, her father decides to join her.
That’s the kind of thing Edek Rothwax does. Infuriating as much as he is endearing, Edek is an ebullient karaoke king who can make new friends on any bus stop. Father and daughter make a classic odd couple. Ruth is not inclined to make friends. Sharp of tongue and permanently exasperated, she is a compulsive eater who is simultaneously on a constant rollercoaster of fad diets; Edek calls her “Pumpkin” which, of course, she hates. He offers unwanted advice on her wrecked marriage; she tells him off for having egg stains on his jumper. You know these people: they have provided the laughs in TV family sitcoms since the form was invented.
Equally, there are no surprises in Von Heinz’s interpretation of her material. Treasure is a road movie that never commits a traffic violation or takes an unexpected turn into a side street. Father and daughter go from one hotel to the next, bickering between themselves, wrestling with Polish and steadfastly avoiding discussing uncomfortable truths, even when they rise up to meet them. They find a factory once owned by the Rothwax family and the flat where Edek lived as a boy, now occupied by several generations of a Polish family who fear these returning Jews are there to reclaim it. There is nothing Edek wants less; he just wants to escape so he can stop looking at his mother’s teapot, now the heirloom of these usurpers.
Inevitably, the trip culminates with a visit to Auschwitz. The sorry and pity of this place is so enormous that no mere story can contain it. Filmed with special permission outside the fence and then modified with CGI to suggest that we are in the camp itself, this sequence is at its bleakest when Edek points to a square of the floor in a ruined dormitory. That was where his bed was. “I slept in the middle,” says Fry, his voice even. “Nobody wanted to sleep in the middle; you could get crushed.” But it may be what saved him; anyone who slept near the door, he goes on to say, usually died overnight of cold. These details, with their terrible ring of truth, resonate with greater force as we see Edek’s habitual bonhomie fall away.
Only for a few moments, however – those moments in which the subject puts the film and its performances beyond criticism. Treasure is otherwise a strangely flat experience, the Fry-Dunham dream team barely sparking a laugh between them and the original story’s central theme of trauma passed down within Jewish families never explored in any visceral way, merely illustrated with the pile of Nazi historical literature Ruth carts around in her suitcase and signalled by her obsessive consumption of potato chips. Ruth is not doing so well; as her father observes over the breakfast table where she insists on bringing her own assortment of seeds, she looks terrible.
Treasure, however, never gets to grips with her submerged heritage of suffering. She does buy back the teapot, along with some other bits and pieces, but that just doesn’t feel like enough.
Title: Treasure
Festival: Berlin (Berlinale Special Gala)
Distributor: Bleeker Street/Film Nation Entertainment
Director: Julia von Heinz
Screenwriter: Julia von Heinz, John Quester
Cast: Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Iwona Bielska
Running time: 1 hour 52 min
