Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic is an inequation with four very capable actors on one side and a whole that doesn’t add up on the other. Nobody can be blamed of over-expecting when Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow and Susan Sarandon star not in a grand epic but a gentle drama. They play such beautifully broken characters.
Jakob Bronski survived the Drancy internment camp, the gulag, and shock therapy. He must have suffered unfathomable cruelty, and yet I think he became the strongest, the happiest, cheering up with the tiniest act of humanity and beauty of nature. He has an aura of peace and his poetry I suspect is the opposite of depressing.
Melanie Lansing was an orphan girl he had helped in the camp. A part of her remained there even as she grew old and married and had a son and a grandson. She almost cherishes the memories of her survival, remembers everyone and everything, and is otherwise suicidal. I wonder how many of those memories were touched up by her.
Christopher Lewis, sent to Drancy by mistake, was another orphan Jakob had helped, and Christopher and Melanie had been thick friends. He chose a solitary life, preferring insects to people. Perhaps he blames the world for sending him to Drancy, especially because he is not Jewish.
I was equally fascinated by the other two characters: the grouchy husband and the detached son who were unintentionally made to share Melanie’s trauma.
When the three concentration camp survivors get to meet again, it is fantasy time for Melanie.
There is something amiss. A story. To me the movie suffered from acute subtlety becoming a mere assembly of a few interesting characters, a silent memorial of an important event. Drancy unlike Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau is less known. The French State played a major role in opening and conducting this camp where 63,000 were murdered.
Updated on 30th May, 2010: I recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s faith trilogy and noticed a couple of things. Max von Sydow plays an important character in both Through a Glass, Darkly and Winter Light. In the former, an important scene is set outside the house, while all four characters (there are only four in the movie) are dining. Karin, the woman has a mental illness, much like Melanie here. Max von Sydow plays the character appearing most sensitive to the woman in both cases. In the latter movie, Max von Sydow plays a fisherman who shoots himself with a rifle, and here he is shown coveting (and later acquiring) a rifle and we are always concerned that he might be trying to commit suicide. Though it appears to be trivia in both cases, a viewer who previously watched both those movies is likely to refer more (and experience more) from Emotional Arithmetic.
Image Source: IMP Awards
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