Year: 2024

Runtime: 112 minutes

Directed by: Julia von Heinz

Written by: Julia von Heinz and John Quester, based on the novel “Too Many Men” by Lily Brett

Starring: Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Wenanty Nosul, Tomasz Włosok

By Sarah Manvel

Warning: Below contains discussion of eating disorders and generational trauma some may find triggering. Please proceed with caution.

It’s been many years since Lena Dunham has acted in a film she’s hasn’t written herself, and many more years since that acting experience has been in a leading role. But the role of Ruth Rothwax in “Treasure,” which she executive produced, is so strongly a Lena Dunham part that it may well have been something she wrote herself. It’s about a 36-year-old woman, a Jewish journalist from New York, who has travelled to Poland in 1991 to see the places where her parents grew up, fell in love, and survived the death camps of the Holocaust. This means the flaws of “Treasure” are the same flaws of Ms Dunham’s other work, a strange kind of exhibitionist narcissism that annoys so much it’s hard to appreciate the value of its points.

Ruth’s motivations for the trip are entirely selfish. When she was a child her parents refused to discuss their Holocaust experiences with her, and rather than understand that this was because it was too damn painful to talk about with an ignorant child growing up safely in an entirely different culture, society and language – Ruth speaks no Polish, only English – she felt excluded, shut out, unloved. And the fact that her father Edek (Stephen Fry, and more on whom later) has insisted on joining her for the trip is an irritating inconvenience more than anything else. 

Ruth has packed a suitcase full of books on the Holocaust for the trip and has a detailed itinerary involving exploring Łódź, the town where her parents were raised, before heading to Auschwitz. But Edek is not so interested in digging up the past, and while at the airport manages to charm (and pay, in dollars) a taxi driver named Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski) into chauffeuring them around for a week. Ruth had pre-booked train tickets so is highly irritated by this change of plans, but can’t stand up to her father. One spends some time wondering if her late mother could either. Instead, alone in her hotel room at night, Ruth self-harms like a teenager, a very difficult thing to watch. On the other hand, her dad carries multiple photos of her ex-husband in his wallet. 

In Łódź and over Edek’s objections, Ruth goes into the apartment block in which Edek grew up and between them they’re able to access the apartment in which Edek was raised. They chat to the resident, Antoni (Wenanty Nosul), who offers tea, and the teapot in which it is served was Edek’s mother’s. Ruth is outraged, Edek begins to recognise other things from his childhood, and before Ruth can react he rushes her out of the door.  

One would think the movie’s dilemma is whether Edek should continue to allow the past to stay buried, even if it means the people who stole from him personally are able to get away with their appalling behaviour, never mind everything else. But this is not quite “Treasure’s” point. Instead it wonders whether Ruth be able to stop acting like a wounded child and come to an adult understanding of both her family’s past and her father as he is. There’s an upsetting scene after Ruth, with the help of a cheerful English-speaking bellhop named Tadeusz (Tomasz Włosok), has gone back to the apartment and bought her grandmother’s entire dish set. Edek finds her in the restaurant dining room, eating a variety of food off her grandmother’s dishes. Her eating is so disordered other characters comment on it and this is the only time she is shown eating well in a normal and healthy way. Edek is frightened to tears that she dared confront some Poles by herself, but even then Ruth is still focused on herself.

Director Julia von Heinz, who co-wrote the script from John Quester and based on a thinly-veiled autobiography by Australian writer Lily Brett (to whose father, Max Brett, the film is dedicated) made a mistake in allowing the movie to focus on Ruth’s messed-up head instead of Edek’s remarkable resilience. Mr Fry, who is not an obvious choice for this part, does exceptional work – and largely in Polish – thanks to his gargantuan personal charm and his ability to embody someone who survived due to a laser focus on the next needed thing. It would have been way more interesting to see Edek slowly realise during this trip how this laser focus wasn’t appropriate for Ruth’s childhood and how his actions, which saved his own life, harmed his daughter. But as it is the ending is just schmaltz instead of a powerful reckoning. 

This is a great shame, mainly because “Treasure” was allowed to film in Auschwitz, where Edek’s small recollections of his experiences make it plain the scale of the evil that happened in that place. But the focus on Ruth means “Treasure” ends up like the conversation I once had with a woman who also visited Auschwitz and told me that if I go I should bring snacks since there’s nowhere inside to buy food. I had never imagined a movie could make me feel the “snacks in a concentration camp” conversation all over again. But as much as we admire Lena Dunham’s talents, as I said in my review of “Catherine Called Birdy”(2022), her audiences are still waiting for her to grow up.