The closing film of last September's Toronto Film Festival is set for its Canadian theatrical bow (this has yet to be picked up for domestic distribution south of the Canadian border) – we've got your first look at Paolo Barzman's Emotional Arithmetic.
Boasting a cast of familiar faces, this is a Canadiana production based on the book by Canadian novelist Matt Cohen and adapted by Jefferson Lewis and Barzman. The film probes the intricate possibilities of love and madness and the shadows the past throws upon the present. Three people who formed a life-long bond in a concentration camp are re-united for the first time forty years later in the bucolic setting of a renovated farm. Sarandon will play Melanie Lansing Winters, a beautiful woman in her 50's who balances her precarious emotional state with an innate sharp, deprecating wit. Byrne will play Christopher Lewis, a British novelist haunted by the survivor's eternal question – "Why was I saved?" Von Sydow will play Jakob Bronski, a heroic dissident and veteran of a Soviet psychiatric hospital; who loses and saves his family twice and David Winter, (Plummer) Melanie's husband, whose compulsive infidelity has left him with a marriage in tatters and an embittered son (Dupuis).
