Julia von Heinz's cinema drama “Treasure”: On the road in nightmare land

Armored by weight. Armored by jokes. “Treasure” lets two severely traumatized New Yorkers, Ruth and Edek Rothwax, a father-daughter duo, go on a road trip.

In 1991, Edek reads from a tourist guide in Poland, the country where the largest Jewish population in Europe was located before the Second World War. In Poland, the country where the Nazi German occupiers began the breach of civilization in the industrial killing of millions of people in Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Auschwitz is not a museum, it is a death camp,” Ruth Harsch corrected a receptionist. And it was precisely this concentration camp that her father Edek survived. The only one in his family to do so.

Daughter Ruth, a woman in her mid-thirties who works as a music journalist in New York, will finally find out more than just that about Edek. More about his parents, his family, his origins in Łódź. The silence of the generation of victims, which Lily Brett describes in her novel “Too Many Men”, the literary basis of “Treasure”, has damaged the connection to the next generation. The Holocaust is as much in the bones of the survivors as it is in their children.

Ruth will no longer accept the silence. She has taken the trip with her father back to his roots, even though he sabotaged it at the beginning. By missing the plane from New York to Warsaw, not boarding a train in Poland and preferring to go to the Chopin Museum instead of his hometown.

“Girls” creator Lena Dunham and the actor, author and presenter Stephen Fry, who is omnipresent in Britain, juggle their roles with a maximum of discomfort. Edek is a prankster patriarch who constantly rubs her daughter, who has separated from her husband, in the face of her single life, childlessness and attempts at dieting. Ruth is a gruff, annoying person plagued by eating disorders who cannot let go of the family past.

At the premiere of “Treasure” in February at the Berlinale, Dunham and Fry said that their families also have Jewish roots in Poland. Members of Fry's family died in Auschwitz. This is certainly one reason why both portrayals of the anxiety on Polish soil are so convincing.

© Łukasz Bąk/Alamode Film

Julia von Heinz, who demonstrated a great sense for political issues with her anti-fascist drama “And Tomorrow the Whole World”, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2018, succeeds in capturing the oppressive mistrust of the Poles. They fear that the homesick American tourists might demand their house, factory or even their mother's tea service back. In order to set foot in the apartment that Edek's family had to leave in Łódź in 1940, Ruth has to pay the current residents money.

A taxi driver as a good Pole

The rapprochement between father and daughter, who learn to talk to each other again despite and because of their cruel past during the journey of heart formation, is moving. Nevertheless, it is too sentimental and Hollywood-esque.

The character of the taxi driver Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), whom Edek, traumatized by the arrival ramp in Auschwitz, hires to avoid train journeys, also turns out to be all too fairy-tale-like as the prototype of the “good Pole”.

The grey post-reunification retro look that Julia von Heinz and her camerawoman Daniela Knapp give the drama in winter colours reinforces the narrative impression of a hermetic story from yesterday. The tone, which is trimmed to lightness in the horror, only reinforces the dying.

Given the current situation of anti-Semitism and right-wing movements, “Treasure” is a lost opportunity. It doesn't help much that von Heinz was allowed to film in Auschwitz-Birkenau at the fence and in front of the entrance to the former camp, something that is rare in feature film projects. The connection to today fails.