vernon film society
Bringing the best in world and Canadian film to film lovers of Vernon and the North Okanagan
EMOTIONAL ARITHMETIC
Director: Paolo Barzman
Cast: Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, Roy Dupuis
Run Time: 99 minutes
Country: Canada/United Kingdom
Language: English
Rating: Not yet rated
In our troubled times of polarized politics and debilitating war, this extraordinary film – a Gala Presentation at the 2007 Toronto Inter-national Film Festival® – asks how we will heal the emotional wounds that linger after great upheaval.
A magical cast in an idyllic lo-cale reflects on an earlier time when the world was in even greater peril. Three people were brutally separated then; now they must find the strength to face tragedy and reclaim the friendships that transformed their lives. Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon, ELIZABETHTOWN, IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH) is a survivor of Drancy, a transit camp set up outside Paris during the Nazi occupation. Now comfortably middle-aged, she is married to David (Christopher Plummer, SYRIANA, THE NEW WORLD) and dotes over her son, Benjamin (Roy Dupuis, THE ROCKET, SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL), and grand-son, Timmy (Dakota Goyo). Her life‘s work has been to bear witness to what she experienced. Melanie‘s life in Quebec‘s picturesque Eastern Townships is turned upside down when she discovers that Jakob (Max von Sydow, SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS, THE DIV-ING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY), a Polish dissident who saved her life in the camp, is still alive. She excitedly arranges for him to visit, but he brings an unwelcome surprise. As a boy, Christopher (Gabriel Byrne, WAH-WAH, JINDABYNE) was at the camp with Melanie; they both felt the first stirrings of love amid the horrors of Drancy. Christopher‘s arrival shatters Melanie‘s insulated existence, allowing complex desires to resurface. These memories make for the mathematics of the film‘s title. Melanie is faced with the limitations of facts and figures to describe atrocity with any adequacy. The men question her obsessive chronicling and attempt to draw Melanie out of her fixation on the past.
EMOTIONAL ARITHMETIC places extraordinary demands on its actors. What a pleasure, then, to see vivacious Sarandon, growling Plummer and gently modulated Byrne play off one another, recreating a love triangle none of them ever wanted. But, even with all this extraordinary talent, it is the elegant, powerful presence of von Sydow, one of cinema‘s finest actors, that imbues the film with its lasting moral weight. Given Barzman‘s focus on humans overwhelmed by tragedy, one cannot help but recall von Sydow‘s collabora-tions with the late Ingmar Bergman, and the great questions that master‘s work continues to ask.
"Director Paolo Barzman‘s sophomore feature … is less a straight matter of addition or subtraction than it is a complex alge-bra equation, with multiple variables that all have a bearing on the sum. It is also … visually lush … Barzman‘s sensitive handling [helps elevate the film] above the realm of the familiar … " – Scott Foundas, Variety
