![]() ![]() Edek, with whom she has a relationship largely rooted in mutual exasperation, wasn’t an essential part of the plan, but he has volunteered his services as a guide anyway. The trip was Ruth’s idea, an attempt to find a renewed sense of personal identity in the wake of a recent divorce and the death of her mother. Her father Edek (Fry) approaches his homecoming with rather less idealism, disguising his wariness with bluff nonchalance. If Ruth Rothwax (Dunham), a lifelong New Yorker visiting the motherland for the first time, harbored any romantic notions of finding herself spiritually at home upon touching down in Warsaw, she is swiftly disabused of them. Brutalist hotel lobbies greet international visitors with their best semblance of tobacco-stained Euro glamor, while rubble-strewn streets and collapsing apartment blocks can’t keep up the pretense. 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. That milieu, in fact, may be “Treasure’s” greatest asset. Taking place in 1991, von Heinz’s film may be set 30 years prior to Eisenberg’s, but it’s the storytelling that feels fusty. ![]() But “Treasure” has to be considered unlucky to have arrived right on the heels of Jesse Eisenberg’s Searchlight-acquired Sundance hit “A Real Pain,” which tells an inevitably comparable story - Polish-American relatives bickering and bonding on a Holocaust tour of Poland - with markedly more wit and edge. 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. ![]()
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