Film Pick of the Week: Treasure - review by Yvette Huddleston

Treasure Prime Video, review by Yvette Huddleston
Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure. Picture: Courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure. Picture: Courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.
Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure. Picture: Courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.

In this thoughtful, moving drama based on Lily Brett’s autobiographical novel Too Many Men, Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham play father and daughter Edek and Ruth who in 1991 travel from New York to Poland together.

Edek is a Polish survivor of the Nazi death camps and it is his first trip back to his home country since leaving after the war to settle in the United States. He is recently widowed and is struggling with the loss of his beloved wife. For Ruth it is partly the death of her mother that has prompted in her a wish to find out more about her Jewish heritage and her family’s past in Poland. She is a journalist who is used to researching and telling other people’s stories but wants to discover where she came from and what has shaped her. Now in her late thirties, she has just gone through a divorce and feels that her future, which had been mapped out, is now uncertain.

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Ruth’s journey to Poland was originally supposed to be a solo trip but Edek insisted on coming, out of a sense of paternal protectiveness. From the outset there is tension between father and daughter. Edek is full of bonhomie, proud of his daughter – he introduces her to everyone as “a famous journalist” – and he is in many ways closed off from his emotions. Ruth finds this difficult and wants to talk to him about his experiences and about their shared grief, unable to understand at first his reluctance to do so.

Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure. Picture: Courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure. Picture: Courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.
Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure. Picture: Courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.

Ruth wants to visit Lodz where her parents grew up and met as young teenagers but Edek seems to want to avoid going there, hiring local taxi driver Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski) and instructing him to take them to other places his daughter might find interesting. Eventually they find the factory once owned and run by Edek’s father and Edek’s parents’ apartment. Ruth persuades the people living there to let them in to look around and they make the painful discovery that many of Edek’s family possessions are still there. Father and daughter also visit Auschwitz-Birkenau where most of their family perished. Ultimately, despite their differences and difficulties, father and daughter become closer as a result of the trip.

The film deals sensitively with some challenging themes including intergenerational trauma, loss, grief, denial, survivor’s guilt and the horrors of the Holocaust, and Fry and Dunham both give affecting, heartfelt performances.

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