Dreamscape (1984)

Toronto Film Festival premiere Sept. 15, 2007 From Corbis; AP; Wire Image; UPI; Flickr

Sevillepictures.com

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{Canada) A Seville Pictures release (in Canada) of a Celluloid Dreams and Seville Pictures presentation of a Triptych Media and BBR production. (International sales: Dreamachine, Paris.) Produced by Anna Stratton, Suzanne Girard. Executive producer, Robin Cass. Co-executive producer, Paolo Barzman. Directed by Paolo Barzman. Screenplay, Jefferson Lewis, based on the novel by Matt Cohen.

Melanie Winters - Susan Sarandon
David Winters - Christopher Plummer
Christopher Lewis - Gabriel Byrne
Benjamin Winters - Roy Dupuis
Jakob Bronski - Max von Sydow

Director Paolo Barzman's sophomore feature "Emotional Arithmetic," which closed this year's Toronto Film Festival, is less a straight matter of addition or subtraction than it is a complex algebra equation, with multiple variables that all have a bearing on the sum. It is also, much like the film that opened Toronto this year, Jeremy Podeswa's "Fugitive Pieces," another visually lush, dramatically obvious story of Holocaust survivors still wrestling with the ghosts of their past, several decades on from the end of WWII. Generally solid performances and Barzman's sensitive handling help to elevate the pic above the realm of the familiar and could result in okay arthouse biz among auds not yet exhausted by the subject matter.

Adapted by Jefferson Lewis from the novel by the late Matt Cohen, "Arithmetic" unfolds primarily against the scenic countryside of Quebec's Eastern Townships region, where the American-born Melanie (Susan Sarandon) lives on a small farm with her history-professor husband David (Christopher Plummer) and their grown son Benjamin (Roy Dupuis). Despite the serenity of this bucolic setting, however, something seems off-kilter right from the start. Perhaps it's the way everybody keeps asking Melanie if she's remembered to "take her pill." Or it could be Barzman's penchant for filming the characters staring meaningfully at the horizon, across rolling hillsides and quiet lakes.

David, we learn, is recovering from a recent heart attack and has turned somewhat bitter in the face of old age. Melanie, meanwhile, is a survivor of the Drancy "transit camp" on the outskirts of Paris, where Jews were detained by the Vichy government before being shipped off to Auschwitz -- memories that intrude on the present in the form of staccato, black-and-white flashbacks. The unlikelihood of an American citizen ending up in a French detention camp is given the cursory, if not entirely satisfying explanation that Melanie's parents were Jewish-American expats living in Paris at the time of the war.

"Emotional Arithmetic" revolves around a reunion between Melanie and Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow), the noted author and fellow Drancy detainee who took the young Melanie under his wing at the time and, in a selfless act of heroism, volunteered to take her place on the Auschwitz convoy. When the now-elderly Jakob travels to Quebec at Melanie's invitation, he surprises her by arriving in the company of Christopher Lewis (Gabriel Byrne), a non-Jewish Irishman who had been interred at Drancy by mistake and whose boyhood infatuation with Melanie has been little dulled by the passing decades.

This gives rise to a roundelay of predictable dramatic conflicts, as Melanie and Christopher ponder the life they might have shared and David stirs with jealousy, all during the preparations for an overly symbolic family dinner during which the unspoken tension simmers to a boil.

Barzman, who previously directed von Sydow in 1994's "Time Is Money," fares better with his actors, particularly Plummer, who brings a rich variety of shadings to what might have been a cookie-cutter gruff patriarch role. Only Sarandon flounders a bit in a sketchily defined role that's a bit like one of those "problem" characters in a 1950s melodrama, whose exact psychological ailment is never pinpointed and whose family seems to think that tucking her away out of public view is the best possible therapy.

Pic also benefits from Barzman's strong visual imagination and rewarding collaboration with ace d.p. Luc Montpellier (who shot Sarah Polley's "Away From Her" and Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World"). Together, they conceive of the pic's flashback scenes as abstract, dreamlike affairs in which the action plays out against enlarged photographic backdrops, while contempo scenes are filmed in breathtaking, color-saturated widescreen.

Camera (color, widescreen), Luc Montpellier; editor, Arthur Tarnowski; music, Normand Corbeil; production designer, Jean-Francois Campeau; costume designer, Nicoletta Massone; sound, Dimitri Menard; casting, Heidi Levitt, Andrea Kenyon; Canadian casting, Randi Wells. Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Closing Night Gala), September 13, 2007. Running time: 99 MIN.

TORONTO - The Toronto film festival began 10 days ago with Fugitive Pieces, a movie based on a Canadian book about people who were haunted by memories of the Second World War, and it ended last night with Emotional Arithmetic, a Canadian film about the same thing. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask Christopher Plummer -- one of the co-stars of Emotional Arithmetic -- about the role of memory, and of the past, and also of a musical he once made set in the turmoil of the Second World War.

"You can't know the future unless you know the past," Plummer was saying in that familiar, rich voice that has declaimed the words of Shakespeare from the world's stages and the songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein from its screens.

In Emotional Arithmetic, Plummer plays David Winters, a Canadian teacher married to a woman (Susan Sarandon) who was held in an internment camp during the war and whose emotional life is still tied to the people she knew there. He's a man who finds himself embroiled in the past: jealous of his wife's relationships, guilty about his own womanizing, and yet still closely connected to his wife. "Their marriage wasn't a raging success, but then whose is?" says Plummer, who has a sort of no-nonsense attitude about most things.

It's a complex role in a movie with many emotional levels and while Plummer sees a bit of himself in David -- "the sort of self-deprecating humour and the cynical fun he has, out of self-defence" -- it's a part that he says isn't like him at all. Playing such characters is just a way of exploring another person.

Just don't ask him if it's part of a voyage of self-discovery.

"I think that's pretentious, although they all say it. A movie star is someone who is always the same, because he doesn't let the audience down. I remember when Gregory Peck played his first villain, the audience almost slaughtered him. They wouldn't forgive him for being the bad guy. They wouldn't accept him. How awful that must be. I want to play everything, and I think an actor should play everything: they should be evil, they should make you hate them, they should make you love them. All those things. I'm not hidebound by 'the voyage of me'."

Plummer, who was born in Toronto 77 years ago, says there was a time when he could have gone in the direction of movie stardom. However, he hated leading roles because the characters were so often cardboard figures. "The idea of a leading man: I couldn't wait to be a character actor."

It's different on stage, which is more about words than images.

"Movies is not a medium for writing, it's a visual medium. The better the film, the more sparse the dialogue. Or vice versa. But we go to the theatre because the greatest writers of all time have written for it and the word is everything."

The two kinds of acting complement each other for Plummer: In movies, he learns a kind of simplicity that he can bring onto the stage. In either place, though, he's an actor who gets by on intuition and technique.''

He has no patience with young directors who shoot too much film, hoping they'll figure out what they want later, or with actors who talk about "suffering for their art."

"I have to work. I love my job. I don't suffer for my art." He laughs at the thought of it. "They all try. They all try to suffer. They think if they don't suffer there's something awfully wrong.

"I think the whole business is a business of joy. Whether you're playing a tragedy or a swinging comedy, it's all joy. You've got to attack it, otherwise the audience will know right away you're not having fun. Either dark fun or light fun."

That is especially true on stage, where "no one can cut away. They have to listen. And in order to make them listen in this day and age, you have to be f---ing good." Audiences come with a shorter attention span, which accounts for the new popularity of the musical.

Which brings us around, perhaps inevitably, to The Sound of Music, the 1965 musical in which Plummer played the role of Captain Von Trapp, disciplinarian, military man, and stodgy lover of Julie Andrews. It's his best-known role, an identification that he acknowledges bothered him for a long time.

"I think I've done enough now that enough people know about the fact that I've done other things. But I don't mind. It helped get bodies in the seats. It helped sell tickets. I'm grateful to it, sure. It just wasn't he most fun I've ever had."

Plummer says he loved working with Andrews, but his role was dull. He remembers asking the cousin of Captain Von Trapp what the man was really like, and he replied, "The most boring man I ever met."

Laughs Plummer: "I didn't go away with a lot of confidence."

As for the roles he loved, most come from the stage: "I actually had fun, if you can call it fun, doing King Lear," a role that won him a Tony nomination. He adds, however, that King Lear is a badly designed play because the lead character has long breaks while a different play is going on. "'Wait a minute. Come on guys. Has anybody read what the title says? King Lear. Now we're looking at The Tragedy of Gloucester.' F---k 'em. I want to get back on stage."

Emotional Arithmetic is scheduled to open in spring 2008.

TORONTO (CP) - Veteran Canadian actor Christopher Plummer has arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival at the ideal time.

His two movies, "Closing the Ring" and "Emotional Arithmetic," were slotted with galas at the tail end of the 10-day event when most of the industry types are gone, allowing the actor to skirt much of the festival fanfare that he despises.

"This is not good for publicity (but) I'm going to say it anyway - the crowd that surrounds a film festival are kind of the piranha fish that follow the shark and you never see them for the rest of the year, thank God," Plummer, 77, said Friday in an interview.

"They're the entourage, the hangers-on, the people that suddenly a festival attracts, and they're a whole other group. I'm not talking about the deal makers (or fans), I'm talking about the crowd that surrounds them, and that's depressing because it can ruin places like the South of France (where the Cannes Festival is held)."

The iconic, Emmy-winning actor with prominent Canadian lineage - Prime Minister Sir John Abbott was his great-grandfather - was born in Toronto and grew up in Quebec but now lives in Connecticut.

Plummer will close out the festival Saturday night when he walks the red carpet for "Emotional Arithmetic" in which he plays the husband of Melanie (Susan Sarandon), an internment camp survivor from the Second World War.

The film, which takes place in 1985, centres on Melanie's reunion with two of her fellow transit camp survivors - played by Gabriel Byrne and Max Von Sydow - in the picturesque fall landscape of Quebec's Eastern Townships. French-Canadian actor Roy Dupuis plays the son of Melanie and David (Plummer).

"There was a certain sophistication in it that doesn't exist in most, rather brutal, Holocaust movies," Plummer said in a hotel room with a sharp articulation refined through decades of meaty theatre roles that have earned him several Tony Awards.

"Emotional Arithmetic" is based on the novel by the late Canadian writer Matt Cohen and was directed by Montreal screenwriter Paolo Barzman, whose father wrote the 1964 film "The Fall of the Roman Empire" in which Plummer starred.

Jefferson Lewis, also of Quebec, is credited as the screenplay writer for "Emotional Arithmetic," but Barzman says he's disputing that.

"The dispute is just that I worked for two years on the script, in collaboration with that person, and then on my own twice for big chunks of time and he claims he did it alone," Barzman said in a phone interview Friday.

In January, the Writers Guild of Canada ruled that Lewis was to receive sole credit for the screenplay. Barzman then took Lewis to the Quebec Superior Court, which dismissed the case for jurisdictional reasons.

Whoever wrote the script did a fine job, giving Plummer's character some memorable one-liners that add a bit of humour to the dark storyline about how memories can linger and torture a soul.

"He did have an . . . acid sort of humour and I liked that about David," said Plummer, who has starred in countless films and TV shows and will forever be remembered for his role at Capt. Georg von Trapp in the "The Sound of Music."

Plummer planned to attend the gala screening with his cast members at Roy Thomson Hall on Saturday, but wasn't looking forward to it.

"Ghastly experience," a surprisingly self-conscious Plummer said about being amongst a discerning audience that may not like his performance.

"I hate it. I hate it. I really hate it because there's nothing you can do about it. I'm a stage actor and although I've done hundreds of movies, I'm still a stage actor and I know how to control an audience ... if I didn't like something, I can change it in a second in front of them. And sitting there with (the film audience) ... there's nothing I can do about it."

TORONTO -- When Susan Sarandon first met with the filmmaker behind "Emotional Arithmetic," the film that closes the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, the subject of the Hollywood blacklist naturally came up. "It was a connective something," said director Paolo Barzman.

Paolo's parents, Ben and Norma Barzman, were targets of the blacklist, which barred Hollywood professionals from working in the industry if they were suspected of having ties to communism and which, this November, marks its 60th anniversary.

The Barzmans, successful screenwriters in the 1940s, were warned by friends, including a young Norma Jeane Baker (who would later be known globally as Marilyn Monroe), that they were being watched. The surveillance got so intense that Groucho Marx, a neighbor, once joked, "Yes, it's hot enough for me, my mother and grandmother. Of course, it's doubly hot for you," recalls Norma Barzman, now an agile 87-year-old living in Beverly Hills.

The Barzmans decamped to Europe in 1949, and Ben got work in the film industry there, eventually using his own name and getting honored by the French Communists. The younger Barzman, 50, was born and raised in Cannes, France, for which he says he is thankful. Yet for him, it was not the blacklist that resonated most in his life, it was the proximity of the Holocaust.

"Of course, I always heard of [the blacklist], but growing up in France, the war was quite close and we were living like rich people. Mother would be moaning and complaining about the blacklist, but they were having this great life with Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers coming [around] at home."

Barzman remembers thinking, " 'You guys are miserable? You didn't go into the camps. There were people who were talking about the camps and real survival, and you were talking about the wounded ego.' " While he does understand their psychic pain, "at the same time, as a kid, you're living very well . . . the logic is, what is it to be happy?"

It's this "happiness" that would seem so unattainable for the three main characters of "Emotional Arithmetic," whose lives seem to have stopped at the Drancy deportation camp, where the Vichy government in France abetted the Nazis in transporting Jews, including 6,000 children, to their slaughter.

Adapted from a Matt Cohen novel of the same name by screenwriter Jefferson Lewis, "Emotional Arithmetic" is about the toll of memory on Holocaust survivors. With a cast that includes Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow and Gabriel Byrne, it would seem to be the film that would take the Barzman brand back to Hollywood in a way that Ben Barzman never managed, despite his return to Los Angeles in 1977. He died in 1989.

The isolateddrama reunites as adults a pair of children from the camp (Sarandon and Byrne) who had a deep love emotionally beyond their years. They meet again, along with the man who sacrificed to save them (Von Sydow) and suffered interminably for it, for 24 hours at a placid farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. There they seek a temporary balance to sort out the "devoir de mιmoire, droit ΰ l'oubli" (the obligation of memory and the right to forget), as Barzman says in French.

Byrne thinks that it is, in fact, impossible to forget. "It stays not only with the person but is buried within the tribal DNA. There is no way to expiate it. It still exists and still affects the present. In reality, we can't have resolution -- only fiction and art can provide it."

Sarandon's character, Melanie Lansing Winters, is a woman who identifies with all the oppressed in the world and writes filing cabinets full of letters keeping track of victims and prisoners.

"Those who decide not to hate -- reversing into the negative -- don't forget," Sarandon says. "What they decide to do with the memories, that's where they become brilliant. You don't want to forget. Healing is not pretending it didn't happen. It's what you are taking from and do with the experience."

Of the character that Von Sydow plays, a persecuted poet who goes from Auschwitz to the gulag, Byrne says simply, "he represents the thin notion of God in the world. The promise of God in the world." Screenwriter Lewis perhaps sums this up neatly with the poetry he wrote for the film, "If you ask me do I believe in God, I will say, 'Not yet.' "

But it is the last two characters here -- Melanie's husband and son -- who are closest to director Barzman's heart. He shaped the father character in his own father's image. Plummer says of the role, "I play a male nurse to the whole situation. It's a terrible responsibility."

Barzman particularly points to the way Plummer yells and screams using philosophic- al phrasing just as his father did.

And the son (Canadian actor Roy Dupuis), who is a "silent witness," Barzman identifies as having the same role he felt he had in his own family over the blacklist. "You know the territory there; it's like an axiom, you have to respect . . . . It was in the book. That's why this thing echoed so much when I read it."

Closing Night Gala: Emotional Arithmetic
Director: Paolo Barzman
Writer: Jefferson Lewis
Producers: Anna Stratton, Suzanne Girard
Cast: Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Roy Dupuis
Distributor: Seville Pictures
International Sales: Dreamachine

At first glance, this year's closing-night film - Emotional Arithmetic - doesn't look entirely Canadian.

The dazzling international ensemble cast includes Oscar winner Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking), Irish powerhouse Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects), Swedish film legend Max von Sydow, Tony and Emmy Award-winning Canuck Christopher Plummer (A Beautiful Mind), and arguably the hottest thesp in Canada today, Roy Dupuis (The Rocket).

Emotional Arithmetic is not exactly "a reflection of Canada to Canadians," but don't call it a 'Holocaust film' in front of director Paolo Barzman.

"I really hate that classification and what it means," Barzman tells Playback. "All of these films are so different, and they deal with it in such a different way. To put them in the same category is meaningless."

The $6.8-million film's title refers to the process of dealing with a painful past, as played out at a dinner party including Holocaust survivors Jakob (von Sydow,) Christopher (Byrne) and Melanie (Sarandon). During World War Two, Jakob protected the other two when they were children in a "transit camp" in Drancy, France. The dinner marks their first reunion, four decades later.

Plummer portrays Melanie's husband David, and Dupuis is Benjamin, their son and witness to the pain and the promise of redemption.

The script is based on the novel by the late Canadian writer Matt Cohen.

Producer Anna Stratton of Toronto's Triptych Media believes Emotional Arithmetic has a universal theme about healing in a world that continually struggles with war (a pervasive theme in films at this year's event).

"The world is in the grips of dealing with the memories of the past and struggling to move forward," says Stratton. "How do we move forward as a planet? I hope our film contributes somewhat to that discussion."

Barzman and Stratton contend that the project is an assemblage of themes played out by an incredible cast.

"Our challenge in the beginning was to find an ensemble of actors," explains Stratton, "even including our little Timmy [Benjamin's son, played by Dakota Goyo], who would really [complete] an ensemble [cast]" that would build its own dynamic.

"They each needed to be truly fine actors on their own and to be willing to throw themselves into this distant location in [Montreal] on a relatively small film," Stratton continues, praising their courage. "It's quite risky, but that's what they did."

The character of Jakob unites the disparate group in the story, and the actor who portrays him, von Sydow, topped the producers' wish list from the get-go.

Von Sydow's performance in the late Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) - is the stuff of cinematic legend, and this legend doesn't need the work, but he connected strongly with the novel. And it didn't hurt that he already knew Barzman, as the two had worked together on the director's first feature, Time Is Money (1994).

The character of Melanie, meanwhile, is a complex one - beautiful, powerful, and yet teetering on the edge of madness under the weight of her own suffering. Who better than Sarandon?

"We thought from the beginning Susan would be the most wonderful casting," says Stratton. "She has this incredible range." And they got her.

Byrne's character, Christopher, is a loner - an entomologist who has spent more time with insects than people. But still waters run deep - and once again they scored with casting.

"We wanted someone who could play that quiet side, but also has this tremendous magnetism, and when this magnetism is ignited, Gabriel is so wonderful at that," says Stratton.

Stratton credits the dedication and persuasive power of L.A. casting director Heidi Levitt, originally from Montreal, and director Barzman for inspiring the actors to sign up.

"Susan, at the time, had problems with some aspects of the script, but it wasn't a very difficult sell," recalls Barzman. "Each one of them saw right away the potential of it. In my first encounter with Christopher Plummer, he said he was so happy to be involved with what he said was such an intelligent project, and Roy - he was just coming out of Shake Hands with the Devil. The whole film was on his shoulders.

"In our film, [Dupuis] has a lot of presence but not that much dialogue. I think he was really intrigued by the story itself, but also to be in a film where he was not carrying everything, to impose a presence without being scrutinized too closely all the time and have tons of dialogue. He did it in an incredible way," Barzman explains.

This international cast is also an ensemble cast, so Cancon watchdog CAVCO was comfortable with the naming of Plummer and Dupuis as lead and second lead performers (for tax-credit purposes, Canadian rules dictate that a Canuck actor is usually the lead).

Suzanne Girard of Montreal's BBR Productions shares producer credit; Tritych's Robin Cass is exec producer.

This film is dedicated to the late Rebecca Yates (Girard's business partner) and novelist Cohen. Stratton had been working with Cohen in the late 1990s, and after his untimely death in 1999, she acquired the rights to his novel.

Seville Pictures has skedded the Canadian theatrical release of Emotional Arithmetic for early 2008.

International rep Dreamachine has presold a number of territories, including Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, India, Latin America and Israel.

Globe and Mail, July 19, 2007

Toronto Star, July 19, 2007

Globe and Mail, Sept. 6, 2006 with mention of Emotional Arithmetic. "It's a very interesting film. Don't ask me to explain it to you. It's got a lot of humanity and edge."