‘Treasure’ Review: Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry Revisit Painful Family History in a Well-Meaning but Maudlin Father-Daughter Tale
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic After several years working in German TV and locally-oriented film projects, Julia von Heinz had a significant breakthrough with “And Tomorrow the Entire World” — a taut, punchy political thriller with a youthful spirit of anti-fascist revolt, vigorous enough to land a Venice competition slot.
Its success evidently raised the status of the director’s long-held passion project, an adaptation of Australian novelist Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical 2001 title “Too Many Men,” which reckoned thoughtfully with her parents’ experience as Auschwitz survivors, and the hereditary nature of trauma.
It emerges here, in somewhat simplified form, as “Treasure,” a watchably meandering vehicle for Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry to wrestle out father-daughter conflicts both trivially universal and hauntingly specific to history.
The urgency and dynamism that marked von Heinz’s last feature are largely absent; for a story of such particular and searing sorrow, it feels rather mild.
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