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‘Treasure’ Review: Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry Revisit Painful Family History in a Well-Meaning but Maudlin Father-Daughter Tale
Starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry, Julia von Heinz's staid 'Treasure' grapples earnestly with the intergenerational legacy of the Holocaust.
Premiering in an out-of-competition Berlinale slot, this story of a depressive American journalist and her rascally Polish father on a fractious trip to his former homeland may find a receptive arthouse audience when Bleecker Street releases it Stateside this summer, on the strength of its familiar stars and ever-resonant subject matter. With the help of highly resourceful production design by Katarzyna Sobańska and Marcel Sławinski (the ace Polish team behind Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” and “Cold War”), the film captures with a vivid, ragged specificity the sense of ruin and barely gleaming possibility of a country struggling to its feet after the fall of the Iron Curtain. There are shades here of the intimately troubled, oil-and-water father-daughter relationship that powered Maren Ade’s extraordinary “Toni Erdmann” — of which Dunham, as it happens, was once slated to write a since-aborted remake — but “Treasure’s” script, written by von Heinz with husband and regular collaborator John Quester, doesn’t examine it all that deeply.
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