This Saturday’s Bowen Island Film Society’s screening is Emotional Arithmetic. The story is set in the summer of 1985. A reunion is taking place at a farm in rural Quebec. Melanie [Susan Sarandon] is about to reconnect with two other survivors of a transit camp where she was interned as a child during World War II. Her historian husband David [Christopher Plummer] is ambivalent about the impending reunion, and for good reason, since Melanie has battled mental illness since the camp experience and the arrival of her friends Jakob [Max von Sydow], and Christopher [Gabriel Byrne] may well precipitate God-knows-what kind of breakdown in Melanie [who, in anticipation of the reunion, has gone off her medication]. For their parts, Jakob and Gabriel have their own reasons for apprehension – Jakob, as the senior member of the triad, feels some responsibility for the lives his younger charges have lived since the war ended -- ‘I should not have told them to remember, I should have told them to live’, he reflects sadly at one point. Meanwhile Christopher has carried a torch for Melanie throughout his entire life.

The film builds to a climactic dinner party en plein air, where David – acerbic, cynical -- persists in asking the hard questions, which are often good ones, though it is clear that they are having a destructive effect on the delicate psychic condition of the others all the same. At the same time he seems somewhat disconcerted, and even envious, to be eating dinner at the same table as people who don’t talk about history, but actually are history in a way he can’t be. The sudden, and symbolically significant, intervention of a thunderstorm mercifully cuts the ‘party’ short, and everyone heads off to various barns and guesthouses to, as they say, ‘find closure’.

Loving camera-work in the rural Quebec context and beautiful overexposed black-and-white ‘flashback’ sequences are two additional highlights of this film.

Michael Epp