contemporary world cinema for salmon arm and kelowna |
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Emotional Arithmetic
Country: Canada/UK
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In our time of polarized politics and war, this extraordinary film asks how we will heal the emotional wounds that linger after great upheaval. A magical cast in an idyllic locale reflects on an earlier time when the world was in even greater peril. Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon) 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) and dotes over her son Benjamin (Roy Dupuis) and grandson (Dakota Goyo). Her life’s work has been to bear witness to what she experienced. Melanie’s life now 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 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. 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 it is the elegant powerful presence of von Sydow that imbues the film with its lasting moral weight. 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 han-dling [helps elevate the film] above the realm of the familiar … .? – Scott Foundas, Variety
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