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.
