The very acclaimed and very British actor, comedian, and writer Stephen Fry, who plays a Holocaust survivor in Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, which just premiered at the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the very American and wildly famous actress, screenwriter, and director Lena Dunham, who portrays his daughter in the film, might seem like polar opposites, likely to clash on a set – but it turns out that they were a movie family made in heaven.
Speaking at a press roundtable interview at the Berlinale, they had an ease together off-screen that seemed to be an extension of their on-screen chemistry.
Said Fry, “When we met each other, it seemed so natural, [and] we had a lot in common. We see the world in similar ways, and we have a similar sense of humor, but also the ability to move from seriousness to humor and back again, without that seeming to be a contradiction, and understanding that life is both funny and tragic, and you don’t have to hold one view.”
A moving and character-driven drama
Treasure is a moving and often surprisingly funny character-driven story of intergenerational trauma, and how Edek, a Holocaust survivor father, and Ruth, his American adult daughter, confront this trauma on a trip to Poland, including visits to the father’s childhood home and, of course, to Auschwitz.
Based on the novel Too Many Men by Lily Brett, it is the third part of director von Heinz’s Aftermath Trilogy, which includes And Tomorrow the Entire World and Hanna’s Journey (which takes place mainly in Israel), which explore the legacy of the Nazis in postwar Germany.
Beautifully acted by Fry, who has made such classy films as Peter’s Friends and Gosford Park, and Dunham, best known for the series she created and starred in, Girls, Treasure is a very particular story that will evoke universal emotions in audiences.
ONE OF the things Dunham and Fry have in common, they said, are complicated Jewish backgrounds, in which their history was often concealed (or sanitized).
“My grandmother had died recently when I got the script,” said Dunham. “She was 96, and she was greatest connection to Jewish life [in my family], but also there was a lot that she didn’t say....“I had been to Poland but I had never been to Auschwitz, so I think it was a very powerful thing to do, and to be able to do it with Stephen and with Julia and have this dialogue around it.
“Only a few months before I went, I found out that although we had always been told our family was Hungarian, Hungary was just where one survivor, post-Holocaust, moved. Our family was from Poland, very close to where we filmed.”
The character Edek, whom Fry plays in such an entertaining but profoundly moving way, reminded him in some ways of his own grandfather, who was not a Holocaust survivor but an immigrant to Britain from Hungary. “He was a kind of Jewish man who, because of the memories of antisemitism and poverty and having been pushed out, you embrace life all the more. Not everyone would do that, but he had the attitude that you want to enjoy food and song and friendship and freedom, freedom from persecution, freedom from all those terrible things you’ve experienced and that your family has experienced. So, yes, it is a ‘type,’ if you like.”
For Dunham, the aspect of preparing for and filming the movie that most surprised her was learning how both religious and secular Jewish life blossomed in Poland before the Holocaust. “I think learning the details of not only religious Jewish life but of daily Jewish life... during the pre-Holocaust period, where Jews were allowed to flourish and embrace their identity, and learning actually how settled and successful many of these people were before this changed, was something I hadn’t fully appreciated before.”
Actually filming in and around Auschwitz was understandably wrenching for both of them, and Fry said being there challenged his perception of what a death camp would be like.
“For me, in a strange way, the shock was going to Auschwitz,” he said. “It does sound strange – how can you be shocked by Auschwitz?”
While he knew the facts about the death camp, “I imagined it as a dark, looming, Gothic place with huge, high towers and sooty brick – and it’s almost obscenely ordered, neat, and you realize it really was thought out. The barracks and their lines were all absolutely symmetrical, the railway line that goes along is clean, and it’s sort of shocking that it was. I expected it to be a vision of the inferno, with smoke and darkness, and instead it’s almost like those pharmaceutical firms along the New Jersey Turnpike, with a bit of grass and then a low building; it’s all very elegant. It reminds one of the planning and the industrial nature of the death, that it wasn’t ‘Oh, God, we’ll find a few sheds and barns and put them in, but we will design everything to be exactly functional.’”
Working together gave them an appreciation for each other’s different styles, they said. “Of course I had seen Girls and I knew she was a brilliant and almost unbelievably potty-mouthed woman, and it was such a delight to see the sensitivity as well as the piercing wit behind it. It was an honor – it really was.”
But beyond that, they said that as they played the characters in the film, they found a new empathy for the older generations.
Said Fry, “That’s what I realized about Edek is that you survive Auschwitz – surviving Auschwitz is, of course, fortunate, it’s ‘Thank God, you didn’t die’ – but what would he have seen every day for the two years that he was there on work detail? The number of people he would have seen just shot out of hand or been clubbed on the head because they had fainted or collapsed, seeing trains arrive every day, watching the smoke go up, smelling the smell that everybody knows was so appalling.
“And then you have a beautiful baby girl in New York and freedom in New York and prosperity – do you want your girl to know anything about the depth of depravity of which human beings are capable? No, you want to protect her from that. You don’t want her to know anything about that. You want life to be simple – ‘Ah, don’t talk about that!’ Which is annoying to an intelligent girl growing up who wants to know about the world. She thinks, Why is he always deflecting and pushing away?”
Dunham expanded on this thought: “I felt like Edek gave me a lot of empathy, actually, for my family, for my mother and her mother and my grandfather, because I always felt like I was the one who was trying to push into this territory in a conversation, and they were always like, ‘Why are you being provocative?’... My grandmother would always say, ‘Let’s just have a nice time’; that was her favorite thing to say....
“At the time I was very close to my grandmother, but there was always some sense I had that she was in some way absent or vapid, when actually I didn’t know that she had been already been an adult woman on the verge of getting married when her nine aunts and uncles were killed. She was in America, but she knew what was going on, and those were conversations that she didn’t want to have, and that was why she pushed it away and every day was nice, everything was nice, everyone was nice. I found it maddening, and it was only through doing this film that I understood why.”
Treasure will be opening around the world, and in Lev Cinemas in Israel, later this year.