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Genre : Drama | Original Language : English | Country : Canada
Directed by : Paolo Barzman Screenplay : H. Jefferson Lewis Cinematographer : Luc Montpellier, CSC Editor : Arthur Tarnowski
Producers/ Co- Producers : Anna Stratton, Suzanne Girard, Paolo Barzman, Robin Cass
Duration : 112 Mins
“Paolo Barzman's film goes to the very heart of these ideas while also bringing Matt Cohen's well known gift for creating characters of great intensity and passion beautifully to the screen.”
- Patsy Aldana (Widow of Matt Cohen, author of novel Emotional Arithmetic)
Original Title
Emotional Arithmetic
Synopsis
Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon) was sent as a child to Drancy, a work camp and way station to Auschwitz just north of Paris. Her parents were Jewish American expatriates living in Paris who mysteriously disappeared.
In the camp, a 13-year-old English boy, Christopher Lewis, who has lost his journalist parents, befriends Melanie. Christopher is not Jewish and was taken to the camp by the French police in error.
Jakob Bronski, a young Polish dissident who acts as the camp’s unofficial medic and ‘census-taker’, takes the two under his wing and a life-sustaining bond develops during their years in the camp. Just prior to the end of the war, Jakob bargains with the soldiers so that he can take Melanie and Christopher’s place on the train to Auschwitz. When Drancy is liberated at the end of the war neither Melanie nor Christopher knows whether Jakob is alive or dead. The children are separated as Melanie is shipped off to relatives in the States and Christopher is sent to live with family in England.
Melanie grows up to be a beautiful young woman. As a university student she finds herself in the arms of David Winters, (Christopher Plummer) a Canadian history professor several years her senior. She marries him and moves to Canada. They have a son, Benjamin (Roy Dupuis).
However her marriage with David is not a happy one. “Warriors on the battlefield of marriage,” as she says, the two wouldn’t know what to do without one another. The couple have split and reconciled several times. David retreats from Melanie’s ups and downs into several affairs and she seeks help for bouts of depression. After David has a heart attack, Benjamin comes to stay with them helping to maintain equilibrium in the household. Melanie tempers her precarious emotional state with a sharp wit. A lively, crazy nomad prone to bouts of depression, she has spent years working tirelessly on behalf of victims of political oppression, continuing a ritual of recording and remembering begun under Jakob’s tutelage in Drancy. Through her obsession with victims and prisoners, she discovers that Jacob (Max von Sydow) is still alive and locates him in a Moscow mental hospital. She immediately offers him a home with her family on a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Christopher (Gabriel Byrne), who now lives in Paris, has become an entomologist specializing in wasps. A solitary man, he still harbours a deep and undeclared love for Melanie although the two have not been in touch for many years. Jakob finds him and brings him to Canada as a surprise for Melanie.
Together for the first time since Drancy the three survivors are flung into an updraft of love, grief and confusion.
