By Sandra Hall
TREASURE ★★★
M, 112 minutes.
Noted polymath Stephen Fry displays his seldom seen whimsical side in Treasure, an adaptation of Too Many Men, Lily Brett’s highly regarded novel inspired by her relationship with her father, a Holocaust survivor.
German director Julia von Heinz’s film is based on a trip that the pair made to Poland, where Brett hoped to find out more about the wartime horrors that her blithely evasive father had always steered her away from.
Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham in Treasure.
Ruth Rothwax (Lena Dunham), a music writer based in New York, plans a highly detailed itinerary which includes the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where both her parents were imprisoned, but her father, Edek (Fry), likes to upset the schedule with impromptu diversions and spontaneous conversations with strangers. Wearing a shapeless grey beard, baggy trousers and an egg-stained jumper, Fry takes to the role with relish, having told interviewers that he saw it as a welcome break from the pompous lawyer parts which customarily come his way.
His charm, however, is lost on Dunham, whose Ruth comes across as being as glum as the film’s design palette – a dispiriting blend of brown and grey. She’s a woman on a mission so consuming that she’s blind to the insights that present themselves along the way.
Both are still mourning Ruth’s mother who’s been dead for only a year, but this doesn’t stop Edek from being open to all possibilities, including a one-night stand with a widowed tourist. Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), the driver they hire for the whole trip, is instantly adopted as a friend and confidant and Ruth comes into their hotel bar one night to find her father leading the other guests in a singalong.
When it comes to the real reason for the trip, however, he holds back. It’s Ruth who barges into the apartment where he grew up, haggling with the current residents in an effort to retrieve a tea set which he recognises as his mother’s. And it’s Ruth who rejects any taint of the euphemistic. “It’s a death camp,” she snaps, rebuking the official who describes Auschwitz as a museum.
Brett’s novel was praised for the delicacy with which it balanced the tragic and the ruefully sardonic in its discourse between the generations. In contrast, the film hammers home its every point. Edek, for example, can be very boring when the subject turns to his conviction that Ruth should never have walked out on her ex-husband. And it’s all too clear that her curiosity about his past is rooted in her dissatisfaction with her own life. She’s looking for a reason why she’s the way she is.
They both pull themselves together in time for a happy ending and the elan with which Fry plunges into his role, making the most of the accent, the shabbiness, the shambling and the indomitable geniality of the man does lift the spirits but Dunham is woefully miscast which means that there’s no spark between them.
Treasure is in cinemas.
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