TIFF ’07: Emotional Arithmetic

**/****
starring Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow
screenplay by Jefferson Lewis, based on the novel by Matt Cohen
directed by Paolo Barzman

by Bill Chambers A "Never Forget" PSA done up as a Bergmanesque psychodrama, the destined-to-be-retitled Emotional Arithmetic at least has the good sense to co-opt Bergman veteran Max von Sydow, who turns in the kind of twilit performance that functions as both a compendium of and an exquisite gateway to a storied career. Asked point-blank how he managed to survive the Holocaust, a prison sentence, and shock therapy, Sydow, as the noble but senile Jewish poet Jakob Bronski, snarls, "I'm hard to kill." It's a goosebumps-inducing moment that has already indelibly etched itself on Sydow's iconography for me, and it fleetingly transforms Emotional Arithmetic into the elegy I think it wants to be–maybe even a savvier one at that. But the movie–in which childhood sweethearts Melanie (Susan Sarandon) and Christopher (Gabriel Byrne) are reunited at the farm of Melanie's college-professor husband (Christopher Plummer) by/with the man, Jakob, who facilitated their release from French internment camp Drancy–is just a little bit maddening. Part of the problem is that veteran TV director Paolo Barzman seems to see only in macro. A perfect example of this is an encounter between Plummer and Byrne that must've taken hours to light but is virtually unravelled by a stray hair on Byrne's person: it becomes an almost hypnotic distraction. And so it follows that the film's didactic façade doesn't really hold up under scrutiny; the moral of the story is hard to wrap one's head around, since it laments history's short memory while advocating selective amnesia as a survival mechanism. Admittedly, I also have a pretty low tolerance for Sarandon, Roy Dupuis (struggling with an Anglo accent as Melanie's son), and countrified intellectuals in general, but that's my cross to bear. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations