Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The blessing and curse of casting hangs over Treasure, a flawed tale of family and history from director Julia von Heinz. Much of why the film has been made at the scale it has comes down to the celebrity of stars Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham. Each gives a committed performance. Yet not a nanosecond passes where you aren’t acutely aware of watching two famous names on-screen, rather than their characters. The film is well-meaning — and also its own worst enemy.The setting is Warsaw, 1991. Just arrived is Edek Rothwax (Fry), an extrovert Polish-Jewish émigré, long resident in New York. Already in Poland is his music journalist daughter Ruth (Dunham). The mood should be sober. The Rothwaxes are here to see the sites of her father’s boyhood before the Nazis. In fact, jauntiness pervades. Edek makes an instant friend of kindly cab driver Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski). A souvenir photo is taken. “Say the cheese,” Stefan says. He is also soon privy to the first of many bickerings between father and daughter. Each has different hopes for the trip. Edek is keen to eat hot dogs at the Fryderyk Chopin Museum. Ruth, however, has a strict schedule and sombre purpose: to reconnect with the trauma of Polish Jews, a history Edek is less eager to revisit.Despite making the locals trip over their English for laughs, von Heinz does a fine job capturing Poland in the first woozy years of post-communism. Cigarette-fugged hotels staffed by mulleted bellboys aim for international glamour. And fascinating questions wait in the cracks between the Rothwaxes’ plans. What is the right way to remember the past? Who gets to decide?All of which makes it doubly frustrating that the movie drifts into a sudsy portrait of the eternal strains between parents and their adult children. You don’t need the memory of the Holocaust for that. The sitcom notes clang louder still. “When did you last have the sex?” Edek asks Ruth over dinner, and you may share the wince that Dunham answers with.★★☆☆☆In UK cinemas from June 14
