Join us for pre-film goodies, unique festivities, live music on the Mighty Wurlitzer and an on-stage conversation with Paolo Barzman, director of Emotional Arithmetic.

Thursday July 31
Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street, San Francisco
Map
8:30pm

Emotional Arithmetic

Melanie Winters (Susan Sarandon) is leading a quiet life in a rustic lakeside farmhouse nestled amid the burnished hills of Eastern Quebec. But judging by the worried looks of her husband David (Christopher Plummer), a gruff retired history professor, and her handsome son (Roy Dupuis), something is amiss with Melanie as she nervously prepares for a reunion with one Jakob Bronski (the peerless Max von Sydow). The long-awaited Bronski was a heroic figure from her traumatic childhood spent in Drancy, the French transit camp outside Paris, which the Nazis used as a way station to Auschwitz. David thinks his emotionally fragile wife should let the past stay buried. "A storm is coming," he warns. "Not that anyone listens to me."

In Paolo Barzman's achingly beautiful drama of love and memory (adapted from the novel by Matt Cohen), the storm comes gently at first, and then relentlessly, as Bronski's arrival with a surprise guest (played by Gabriel Byrne) triggers a whirlwind of complex emotions for Melanie and her family. Over the course of a momentous weekend, all are forced to reassess the choices and compromises each has made to cope with their ruptured lives and the mysterious scars the past has left behind.

Barzman, who studied painting and worked with legendary French director Jean Renoir before turning to directing himself, creates arresting imagery from both the lushly saturated Quebec countryside and the restrained flashbacks to Drancy, deftly rendered by cinematographer Luc Montpellier in abstract black & white tableaux. But Barzman's magical feat in Emotional Arithmetic is to pull together his high-powered cast into a tight ensemble of original, sharply defined characters, anchored by Sarandon but matched in poignancy and power by Plummer, Byrne and the remarkable von Sydow. In this equation, the whole is even greater than the sum of its parts.