"Why did I survive?" It's what countless Holocaust survivors have asked themselves as they struggled to piece together their shattered lives.

In the new film "Emotional Arithmetic," the gut-wrenching movie that closes this year's Toronto International Film Festival, director Paolo Barzman brings together three characters who survived Drancy, a transitory Nazi internment camp outside Paris during World War II.

Based upon Matt Cohen's acclaimed novel, survivor Melanie (Susan Sarandon) is living out a peaceful life in 1985 in Quebec's lush Eastern Townships.

She's married, has a son (Roy Dupuis) and a grandson she adores. Despite the fact that her grumbling, good-hearted husband (Christopher Plummer) has not been faithful, she clings to her tranquil, middle-aged existence on her lovely farm and keeps the memories of her terrible past at bay.

Then one fateful day something resurfaces from that past and throws Melanie's comfortable life completely off kilter.

After discovering that her wartime protector - a father figure named Jakob (Max von Sydow) - is still alive, she eagerly invites him to a reunion dinner at her idyllic country home. When he arrives he is not alone.

Emotions unravel

Accompanied by Christopher (Gabriel Byrne) - her first love and childhood friend in the internment camp, a thousand complex and suppressed feelings flutter across Sarandon's luminous, surprised eyes.

Together again now after so many years, Jakob tells his friends of how he survived Auschwitz. The Polish dissident also gives a harrowing account of his years of imprisonment and his brutal confinement to a psychiatric hospital in Russia.

There, on Melanie's serene, picturesque farm, the horrors of those years and their time together in Drancy come to life again. That, combined with her rekindled feelings for Christopher, send this vivacious woman's emotions spiraling out of control.

A timeless message

Given the political, anti-war themes of so many entries at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, "Emotional Arithmetic" is no less relevant.

How does one survive a Holocaust or a war of any kind? Can a shattered life really be transformed? In short, how does one go on after knowing such tragedy?

Max von Sydow's tour de force performance unravels the answers to those timeless questions

There, in the midst of Quebec's quiet beauty and the comfort of an old friend's home, the trio's wounds gape open again before the audiences'

eyes. But it is with Jakob - a figure possessing an indomitable spirit and a voracious desire to keep on living - that the real meaning of "Emotional Arithmetic" adds up.

From its riveting black-and-white flashback sequences to its treatment of memory as both a hindrance and help to true emotional recovery, "Emotional Arithmetic" reminds every human being that the only way forward after so much pain and suffering is to forgive.

- Constance Droganes, entertainment writer, CTV.ca