Synopsis
Emotional Arithmetic focuses primarily on three people who formed a bond in the Drancy internment camp, where they were imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II: Jakob Bronski (Sydow), who saw goodness in two orphaned children in the camp, Melanie (Sarandon) and Christopher (Byrne), and who helped them to survive. Decades after their release from Drancy, their emotional wounds still affect their lives in different ways when they meet again.
Now in her 50s, Melanie is married to David Winters (Plummer), a cold and grouchy older professor of history, who was once her teacher and who has been unfaithful to her with his current students. A now-elderly poet, Jakob, having survived the gulag, has recently been released from a Russian psychiatric hospital. Christopher, a non-Jewish Irishman who had been interred at Drancy by mistake, now works as an entomologist in Paris.
The three are reunited at a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where Melanie and David live with their grown son, Benjamin (Dupuis), a gourmet cook, who prepares a "life-changing" meal served outside, at a table set up under a tree.
The film's title highlights the complex "emotional arithmetic" of bitterness, jealousy, and love exposed as the characters confront the past, reconcile their feelings about one another, and struggle to move on.
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