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, 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. In Paolo Barzman’s achingly beautiful drama of love and memory, 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.