Emotional Arithmetic

Director: Paolo Barzman
Canada 2007 89 mins
Language: English

Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon) is a survivor of Drancy, a transit camp set up outside Paris during the Nazi occupation. Now middle-aged, she is married to David (Christopher Plummer) and dotes over her son, Benjamin (Roy Dupuis), and grandson, 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), 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) 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. JI