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By Ian Bartholomew
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Sep 05, 2008, Page 16

Film Notes EMOTIONAL ARITHMETIC DIRECTED BY: PAOLO BARZMAN STARRING: GABRIEL BYRNE (CHRISTOPHER LEWIS), ROY DUPUIS (BENJAMIN WINTERS), DAKOTA GOYO (TIMMY WINTERS), CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER (DAVID WINTERS), SUSAN SARANDON (MELANIE LANSING WINTERS), MAX VON SYDOW (JAKOB BRONSKI) RUNNING TIME: 99 MINUTES TAIWAN RELEASE: TODAY

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The accepted wisdom is that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Emotional Arithmetic does the sums on this proposition and suggests that memory is not necessarily an unadulterated good. As its point of departure, it takes the uneasy reunion of three survivors from Drancy, a transit camp in Vichy France for Jews bound for Auschwitz. They meet in the idyllic surroundings of rural Canada, full of red maple, glistening lakes and snow-capped mountains, and into this Eden they bring their memories, their hurt and their love, which were formed in the dark days of the Holocaust.

Emotional Arithmetic is an intimate drawing-room drama that wants to make some big points about how we should remember the past, but also about how we must embrace the present. This rather didactic quality brings to mind the plays of J.B. Priestly or Terence Rattigan, which are very much out of fashion these days.

A wonderful cast is headed by Susan Sarandon, who plays Melanie Lansing Winters, a woman still suffering from depression as the result of her childhood ordeal in the camp. She has invited the aging poet Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow) to her lakeside lodge which she shares with her husband David (Christopher Plummer). Bronski brings along Christopher Lewis (Gabriel Byrne), Melanie’s childhood friend from Drancy, whose attachment — love is too unambiguous a word for the complex relationship — to Melanie remains unaffected by years of separation.

The cast alone is worth the price of admission, for each puts in a magnificent if understated performance. Director Paolo Brazman is unfortunately unwilling to let these fine actors simply get on with telling their story through words, looks and eloquent silences, and feels that dramatic themes need to be underlined with flashbacks to fill in the backstory, and somewhat heavy-handed imagery, such as rain washing away the words of a diary kept by Melanie of her days in Drancy. But these are small hiccups, and Emotional Arithmetic can be enjoyed for some fine moments of dialog and the overall mood of civilized malaise that the characters try to keep under control, if not always effectively.

Approached by an officious neighbor to introduce her friend Christopher, Melanie disingenuously — and with a bitter irony directed at herself — says that they “met at camp.”

Plummer puts in a lovely performance as the older husband who lives in a state of constant frustration with his wife’s memories.

“Being a victim of some terrible apocalyptic event does not make you a saint,” he says, venting his frustration over playing host to this Holocaust survivors club. But in fact, the elderly von Sydow manages a wonderful evocation of a man close to sainthood, a man who could conceivably put himself through years of torture in concentration camps and the gulag to ensure the safety of two children. The tragedy is that Melanie’s undying gratitude and total commitment to Brodski’s belief at the time that nothing should be forgotten has driven her to the edge of madness, an obsessive keeper of information about the victims from various persecutions. “We have 6,000 Jews living in our attic,” Plummer’s character blurts out at one point.

The mood is anti-heroic, skeptical, always with one eye raised about any broad statement of truth, and while the scale of the production is more like a television drama than a feature film, it is a thoughtful work that dares raise occasional challenges to the cut-and-dried verdicts of history. After all, whatever has gone before, life still has to go on, and those who did not suffer still need to be loved and cared for.

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