Director Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, a loose adaptation of Lily Brett’s novel “Too Many Men,” is a Holocaust drama centered upon father-daughter duo Edek and Ruth, whose sense of identity is intrinsically entangled with the family’s agonizing past as Holocaust survivors. The movie delineates their journey to their homeland, Poland, as an effort to reconcile with the generational trauma and mainly focuses on how the pain of being displaced, identity crises, and fear of persecution create radically different worldviews across generations. Treasure opts for a humorous tone to balance the emotionally turbulent confrontations, and even though that works well to a certain extent, it is carried forward only through a singular strain of the narrative, which ruins the effect by the end of the movie. The father-daughter chemistry, although poignantly bittersweet and occasionally endearing, feels contrived at most crucial points of the movie—much like how the majority of the dialogue feels heavy handed and in your face. The weakest part of the movie is probably the final resolution, which feels too haphazard and rushed for its own good.
Spoilers Ahead
What Did Edek and Ruth Find in Their Ancestral Home?
Set in 1991, Treasure follows Ruth Rothwax, a Polish Jewish journalist from New York who is visiting her motherland, Poland, for the first time, to make an effort to reconnect with her roots. Ruth is accompanied by her father, Edek, a happy-go-lucky, bumbling septuagenarian, a Holocaust survivor, who prefers to cover up his broken sense of self within his humorous personality. The wounds of Edek’s dreadful past have not healed, and an emotional disconnect with his daughter has only worsened his unmindful behavior since the death of his wife a year ago. Ruth is the total opposite of her father, living a sheltered life in the States; she has never truly known their past, apart from bookish knowledge, that is, and she yearns to know much more. Ruth shared a good relationship with her late mother—a strict, disciplined woman—who tried to hide her sordid past as a Holocaust survivor in her OCD-induced daily routine, but the occasional panic attacks she used to experience at night allowed Ruth to learn a bit about her mother’s suffering. However, neither Edek nor his wife ever opened up about the trauma, not to each other and not to their daughter either. This resulted in Ruth having a dysfunctional upbringing; later in her life, she also shied away from commitment and responsibility, as Edek blames his daughter for blowing up her relationship with her ex-husband, all the while turning a blind eye to his own contribution to Ruth’s mental condition.
Reaching Poland, the father-daughter duo soon finds themselves at odds as their differing perspectives and motivations clash with each other. Ruth is disturbingly obsessed with digging up the past of her family, so much so that she reads all the anti-Semitic accounts that fuelled the Nazi hatred against the Jews and has secretively tattooed an identification number (just like the inmates of the concentration camps had) on her body—all this because she is out of touch with her true identity as a Polish-American. This obsession of hers has stemmed from her parents’ unwillingness to address the mental issues resulting from a traumatic past, and even now, Edek continues to make the same mistake over and over—hiding his pain and memories with a devil-may-care attitude. Ruth tries to search for her ancestral identity, and Edek tries to pretend as if they have arrived on a merry-trip to Poland, taking her to tourist attractions and whatnot. Ruth doesn’t understand why her father refuses to board a train and chooses to continue the journey in a hired cab instead; or why he is still distrustful of common Polish and German people—and she won’t be able to understand either because her father would rather be suffocated by the haunting memories of the past than admit how he truly feels. Edek’s motivation to come to his motherland was solely to look after his daughter, whom he fears might get into trouble in the face of anti-Semitic persecution.
Taking their new friend, Stefan the cabby, along with them, Ruth and Edek arrive at Edek’s hometown at Lodz and revisit his ancestral place. The father-daughter duo is surprised to learn that after Edek’s family was evicted from the place, the new owners got hold of their family possessions—the crockery, the silverware—everything with which Edek’s childhood memories were associated. Ruth has been collecting pieces of her ‘identity’ in the form of odd collectibles across the city and wants to take the crockeries along with her to carry a piece of ancestral memories with them. However, Edek strongly denounces the idea, and much later, when Ruth buys the tableware in exchange for a hefty sum of money, he expresses his disappointment in her. Memories of past life are something Edek is desperately trying to escape, and as his coping mechanism, he is almost trivializing the dreadful events of the past—much to his daughter’s dismay.
Did Ruth and Edek Finally Find Their Roots?
During Treasure‘s ending, Edek makes new friends in Zofia and Karolina, two Polish interpreters, and much to the embarrassment of Ruth, shares details about her private life with them—almost as if he is making an attempt to discourage his daughter from seeking her identity in her ancestral place and wants her to accept her identity as an American instead. Later, the duo go to Auschwitz, and Edek spends the day remembering the harrowing events, revisiting the places that took away a part of his soul—and Ruth can’t help but take pictures of the place, going so far that she almost takes a piece of brick with her as memorabilia. Later that night, the father-daughter duo return to the hotel, where they are greeted by Zofia and Karolina once again. Ruth’s last straw of patience snaps when she finds out that even after an emotionally taxing day, Edek is busy frolicking with his friends. Ruth decides to end the trip and prepares to return to New York alone. Before leaving, she hands Edek his father’s coat, which she had bought from the present owners of their ancestral home.
Holding his father’s coat, Edek breaks down and finally decides to accept the past without trying to find a way to cop out. Wearing his father’s coat, Edek decides to process the pain by taking Ruth back to their ancestral home and digs out a box that contains the paperwork of their house and factory, which Edek and his father had hidden before being evicted. Using the paperwork, Ruth can reclaim their family home and factory if she wants, and this is indeed the piece of her ancestral identity she was trying to connect with for so long. As Ruth and Edek reconcile while moving to the airport, Edek searches the box to find his childhood pictures—pictures of his cousins and relatives whom he had lost during the Holocaust. Traumatized by their passing, Edek couldn’t muster the courage to let Ruth know about them earlier, but now he has realized the only way to process his trauma is to confront it, and finally he wants his daughter to reconnect with her roots. As the movie ends, the father-daughter duo bids adieu to Stefan and moves on to board the flight. Hopefully, this emotional reconciliation will allow Ruth a much-needed mental closure, and her obsession will end by gaining a sense of identity, signified by Ruth gaining her family’s ‘treasure’.
