Treasure: Lily Brett, an Australian-born novelist and essayist, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and writes about that issue and condition quite a lot. Her 2001 novel Too Many Men deals with the travels of a daughter and her father to Poland in order to uncover the father’s catastrophic history. Several themes are paramount, including the conversations the daughter has with images of the deceased Auschwitz commandant, Rudolph Hoess, in her imagination. Yes, the same Rudolph Roess, or Hoss, who last year of course played a crucial role in Glazer’s Jones’ highly controversial publication, The Zone of Interest.
While working on Brett’s novel, German director Julia von Heinz (in collaboration with John Questor) chose not to include the Hoss material, which regrettably does not matter what her transferist augmentation is. It’s not a treasure — well, “treasure” does retain the quest of the father and daughter, if it were to be set in 1991 when the other characters were wondering how old they were anyway. At least Rothwax appears like a loser at this point.
She’s a journalist based in New York and apparently married only once, sleeps with several packs of stems and nuts about her to help with her hotel breakfast, and has a fairly tense relationship with her father Edek, a Jew from Poland played by Stephen Fry. Ruth is always in a nasty mood, but this time she also believes that Edek seems to care too little for their joint pursuit of something extremely disturbing.
The American Ruth, who consistently keeps up with her mother, has amassed a significant number of surprises. Mistakenly, Ruth assumes that all her acquaintances, no matter where they came from, know how to speak and understand English. It surely is a source of irritation, especially for American tourists, and her repeated omniscience in the telling of the story is somehow much worse.
Did I say narrative? “Treasure” is filled with feelings and feeling at the expense of story. Of course things happen: In Lodz, where Edek was raised before he and his family were taken away to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, his former house now stands next to an ugly beggar family which has probably occupied it since 1940 and possesses lovely china belonging to the Rothwax family. Well, Ruth wants it back, while Edek would like to wash his hands off it.
Then again, there is the issue of Auschwitz itself. Edek is posed a question. Will he accompany Ruth when she goes to the death camp – this is how polices they met refer to it even though Ruth is furious every time they do – or will he not? This is just one out of many contentious issues.
For the most part, those who are sensitive to people’s feelings should know and understand why some of these people with a traumatic pasts don’t want to elaborate on such matters as it can be painful and bring back their past memories.
Ruth is not one of those individuals. Sitting in her hotel room, she attacks her father for not opening up while focusing on Nazi history and bingeing on food. Edek, however, is having a good time with some senior ladies. Ruth, on the other hand, is angered just by the thought that her father could have any sort of companionship after her wife died.
This is an infuriating film. The tempo would make a tortoise look quick; it is unwieldy in terms of the distribution of its parts, and, though Dunham and Fry are excellent actors, it is hard for both to step outside their public or screen impressions. Nevertheless, they manage to do this in quite impressive partial blocks of scenes.
Such as when Edek puppyishly invades Ruth’s privacy with a purpose, or when Ruth about the china argues with the housewives over which the people who live there are goats. Which thanks to the sentimentality of the ending almost had been so good that one would want to overlook the rather silly denouement.
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