Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham lack spark in Holocaust survivor tale

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.

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.

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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.