Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry in the Holocaust drama – The Hollywood Reporter

Lena Dunham (right) and Stephen Fry in “Treasure.”

Anne Wilk

The film is set in 1991, shortly after it suddenly became easier for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to visit sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau, a German-French co-production. treasure It follows a father and daughter (played by Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham) who take this kind of remembrance journey. It is based on the tragicomedy novel A lot of men Written by Australian Lily Britt, and directed by German director Julia von Heyns, famous for her previous two films (nothing else matters And And tomorrow the whole world) also explore the effects of the Holocaust on subsequent generations. So, as a package, treasure He may seem gifted with the raw materials needed to make work that is inherently compelling and interesting.

Unfortunately, the film is an incompetent, poorly made mess – or as my grandmother calls it, a.k.a michgos, so confused and misunderstood that it is difficult to perform a post-mortem, based strictly on a single vision, where things go wrong. One can see the skeleton of a workable, and potentially powerful, script credited to von Heines and her collaborator John Koester, which finds comedy in the mismatched moods and desires between the two main characters.

The kind and cheerful Edik Rothwax (Fry) must have been a young man when he made it out of Birkenau alive and left with his wife, who had been dead for a year in the film. Like many survivors of his generation, Edek just wants to leave the past buried and live in the present. On the other hand, his angst-ridden and traumatized daughter, Ruth (Dunham), a music journalist who, Edek tells everyone, once interviewed the Rolling Stones, desperately wants to connect with her family’s tragic history. It was her idea for them to take this trip to Poland to see the houses where Edek and his late wife grew up in Lodz, the factory his family once owned, and then Auschwitz-Birkenau itself.

It is natural for the two to quarrel from the moment the plane landed in Warsaw. Controlling Ruth is enraged when Edek avoids the train tickets she has prepaid for – given his history, it is unsurprising that he has a thing for trains – and instead makes friends with a kindly taxi driver, Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), who agrees to be their driver for the trip. perfect.

I admit I haven’t read Brett’s book, but from what I can gather on the subject, much of the friction between the two main characters stems from the way Edek, who can speak Polish fluently, interacts with the locals while Ruth sees nothing but smiling antagonism. Sublime all around. It’s easy to imagine that this would have worked on screen as well, but instead something went wrong with the presentation of the characters, as if the filmmakers and actors were afraid to make Ruth too unlikeable. So instead, there’s a heavy focus here on Ruth’s trauma, her bulimia, and her body issues. (And in the form in which it was founded girls, Dunham isn’t afraid to get semi-naked in front of the camera — go girl! Flash that body like you don’t give an AF-K!) She has a strange need to throw money at every Polish person she meets, whether it’s a poor market stall owner selling pigs’ feet or the descendants of Poles who have taken over Edek’s family apartment (who are selling to her, at grossly inflated prices (Things that Edek remembers as belonging to his family).

As shown here, Edek is similarly a mixture of contradictory impulses: one minute he is generous and friendly to every Pole he meets, then suddenly strangely protective of Ruth and upset that she has put herself in danger by going alone with a young translator to meet Ruth. Residents of his old house.

Of course, characters, just like people in real life, can be a mass of contradictions. But somehow, that complexity, that ability to contain diametrically opposed emotions at once, doesn’t appear in Fry’s performance, any more than Roth’s ambivalence seems gestural, and poorly limited, in Dunham’s. Although we all love Fry, a certified national treasure in the UK, he’s never been an actor of wide range, and he’s pretty much at his limits here. Admittedly, it’s very impressive that he took the time to learn Polish well enough to speak much of it throughout the film. But since Edek moved to New York after the war, wouldn’t he speak English with a New York accent instead of sounding like a British Pole from South Kensington?

It’s easy to become obsessed with these quirks because it’s very difficult to pinpoint where things are going wrong treasure. The supporting cast give wholesome performances that serve the screenplay’s obvious goal of evoking the shame that many Poles feel about the Holocaust, and the pervasive desire not to talk about it. And of course there was a widespread fear in the early 1990s that Jews would rightfully return and claim property seized from their families. The production and costume design departments take on a look and feel of early 1990s post-communist vulgarity down to the most micro level, from the mullet haircuts on the men to the brass palm trees in hotel rooms and the way everyone everywhere smoked in those days. .

Somehow, the weak cast and poor direction manage to ruin a very promising premise, one that seems timely in light of current debates about Jewish identity. That won’t help treasure It premieres on the festival circuit shortly after Jesse Eisenberg’s very similar theme Real pain It debuted at Sundance, to strong acclaim. But the world has to be big enough to contain more than one movie about Jews visiting the Old Country and feeling all kinds of emotions. It’s a shame that this isn’t the best take on the material.