Week #1: Treasure
This Treasure is devoid of gems
Treasure is a drop in the ocean of Holocaust films that the world cannot get enough of. The Zone of Interest and the upcoming A Real Pain are just a couple of examples of the mainstream attention that this event continues to get. Is there a catch?
Treasure begins in 1991 at Warsaw Airport, where Ruth (Lena Dunham) anxiously awaits her father’s arrival (he missed the flight he was supposed to take from New York because he wandered off to McDonalds).
Ruth has undertaken this journey—a journey her father Edek (Stephen Fry), is reluctant to take—to understand her roots. She lost her mother a year ago and is also recently separated from her husband, events that have perhaps triggered in her a need to search for somewhere she belongs.
To be clear, Edek is not invited to take part in this journey but is accompanying his daughter as he doesn’t consider Poland to be safe for a lone Jewish woman.
Edek is someone who is unapologetically set in his ways, unburdened by self-consciousness. With his light-heartedness about things, he makes it seem like he has his affairs in order, but it becomes clear fairly early on that he does not wish to revisit places from his past that his daughter so keenly wants him to share a piece of.
But Ruth is her father’s daughter after all and is determined about her mission and if need be she can be ruthless too. When they reach her family’s home in Lodz for instance, in what seems to me to be a sign of American entitlement, Ruth doesn’t bother to ask the occupants if she and her father can come inside but simply says, “I’d like to see your apartment” at which point Edek steps in and says something in Polish.
Subsequently, Ruth ends up “buying” access to her roots from cash-starved new occupants of the house as she pays obscene amounts of cash to reclaim her family’s possessions from them.
During the course of the film, Ruth occasionally reads out passages from books about what the Nazis thought of Jews, which don’t add much to the impact the film is desperately trying to create.
The film could take a cue from The Zone of Interest, where the horror is not seen but felt.
Anyway, as the film progresses it is Edek’s inability to talk about his experiences at Auschwitz that has come to a breaking point. He is now literally in the place about which he has refused to say a word to his now-dead wife and daughter in all these years.
When Edek does finally open up about his family to Ruth, whilst going through recently retrieved family photographs (this is a part of the “treasure” that Edek had buried decades ago) he tells Ruth about his sister and her children, all dead now.
Seeing her cousin's photograph, Ruth asks her dad, “Don’t you think they look a little bit like me?” To which Edek replies, “I always thought so, yes.” Obviously, Ruth asks Edek why he’s never mentioned this to her. Edek says, “Because…It’s not easy to have a child who looks like a child who is dead. And it is not easy to tell her how very much you love her.”
This is meant to be the moment through which Ruth and Edek manage to smooth out the knots in their relationship and live happily after. But it felt unearned. The fact that years of staying mum on the issue and years of Ruth resenting her father for it, was just kind of solved with such a flat scene left me wanting for more.
Particularly, the dialogues coupled with Fry’s performance didn’t make the impact one would hope for such a crucial scene.
The film also couldn't make up its mind on what it set out to do, did it want to be light-hearted and funny or moving, or both? It did neither.
This could have been a great movie about a breakthrough emotional juncture in a father-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. But this opportunity was missed.
Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun for instance, compellingly portrays the tender, innocent moments shared between a father and his tween daughter on a trip to Turkey, while subtly unveiling the darkness that would ultimately overwhelm him. Aftersun was all-consuming and stayed with me for days.
Treasure, on the other hand, is best left hidden.
***
Coming up
In Week #2 of What I Saw Last Week: Jackpot! starring Awkwafina and John Cena, arriving September 15.
In other news…
Shows I’m currently watching: Bad Monkey and Only Murders in the Building S4. Aren’t there too many crime/mystery/thriller shows out there right now? Food for thought.
Books: Have just finished reading Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. The film adaptation of the book starring Amy Adams will be released later this year. Safe to say, have added it to my watchlist.
Note to self: Putting this write-up together made me realise that everything I’m watching and reading right now is American. Why is that? I’m not sure, but I suppose one reason is the sheer volume of American stuff out there and how easy it is to access.