Treasure Review: Takes an engrossing premise and does agonisingly little with it
Intertwining personal drama with the monumental tragedy of the Holocaust is the ‘treasure’ that the film never really unearths
There are two ways in which characters in Julia von Heinz‘s Treasure, the film adaptation of the 1999 novel Too Many Men by Lily Brett, handle trauma. One is by Edek (Stephen Fry), who hides mountains of painful and direct experiences of Holocaust trauma under a blanket of humour and an apparent lack of seriousness. The other is by Ruth (Lena Dunham), Edek's daughter, who, after a streak of personal tragedies, tries to confront her inherited trauma as a means of getting to know her roots.
Add a dysfunctional father-daughter dynamic and a post-Cold War setting to this, and we could have had an intensely moving and bittersweet personal drama about how, even decades after a tragedy, there are still pieces being picked—and how, there always might be, as if you're diving into a never-ending deep sea.
