{"id":1137,"date":"2024-06-19T23:44:16","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T23:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/19\/treasure\/"},"modified":"2024-06-19T23:44:16","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T23:44:16","slug":"treasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/19\/treasure\/","title":{"rendered":"Treasure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and writes frequently on that topic and condition. Her 2001 novel <em>Too Many Men<\/em> is about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father\u2019s tragic past. One of the book\u2019s many features is a series of conversations the daughter has with what she imagines as the ghost of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess. That\u2019s right, the Rudolph Hoess, also spelled Hoss, a real-life personage who was the lead character in Jonathan Glazer\u2019s controversial \u201cThe Zone of Interest\u201d last year.<\/p>\n<p>In adapting Brett\u2019s novel for the screen, director and co-writer (with John Questor) Julia von Heinz omits the Hoss material, possibly wisely, but what she comes up with to add in its stead is relatively mortifying. \u201cTreasure\u201d retains the father-daughter journey narrative \u2014 set in 1991, if you were wondering just how old these characters are, anyway. Ruth Rothwax, played by Lena Dunham, is a New-York-based journalist consumed with self-loathing over a failed marriage, her weight issues (she carries with her plastic containers of stems and nuts with which she makes parsimonious meals at her hotel breakfast table), and her tetchy relationship with father Edek, a Polish Jew played by Stephen Fry. Ruth is perpetually tetchy, not least because she thinks Edek is being a bit too blithe about their shared investigation into his harrowing past. Ruth is also very big on expecting everyone around her to understand and speak English, an annoying trait among American tourists in general, and even more annoying somehow when it\u2019s repeated ad infinitum in a movie narrative.   <\/p>\n<p>Did I say narrative? \u201cTreasure\u201d is packed with emotion and emoting at the expense of story. Things do happen, of course: In Lodz, where Edek was raised before being plucked out with his family and sent to Auschwitz, his old house is occupied by a nasty and poverty-stricken family that\u2019s apparently been there since 1940 and still has the fine China owned by the Rothwax family. Well, Ruth wants to get it back, and\u00a0Edek wants to let it go.   <\/p>\n<p>Then there\u2019s the matter of Auschwitz itself. Will Edek go with Ruth when she visits the death camp \u2014 which several Poles they interact with call a \u201cmuseum,\u201d eliciting a furious response from Ruth \u2014 or not? This is one of many bones of contention.   <\/p>\n<p>People who possess a certain empathy can intuit that the reason some people who\u2019ve experienced trauma in their past don\u2019t wish to discuss that trauma, because it\u2019s, you know, triggering. Ruth really isn\u2019t one of those people. She holds her father\u2019s reticence against him while holing up in her hotel room, consuming Nazi history and trying not to eat. In the meantime, Edek is partying with some female seniors. His wife had died the year before; the very idea of her father enjoying some companionship now is enough to turn Ruth into a petulant prig tyrant.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and writes frequently on that topic and condition. Her 2001 novel Too Many Men is about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father\u2019s tragic past. One of the book\u2019s many features is a series of conversations the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama-movies","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}