Additionally, as someone who believes that perhaps there have been so many WWII films that not only has it become its own genre but that some are hard to tell apart, Barzman’s film — like last year’s Oscar winning foreign film The Counterfeiters -- opened my eyes to something of which I was unaware. Instead of forcing Jewish prisoners to counterfeit funds to aid the German effort, in Hearts (and now I believe you’ll agree that title seems entirely inappropriate) I learned about about the existence of Drancy — a transit work camp that existed just outside of Paris, set up by eager French collaborators working with the Nazis as a stopping point before the Jews were transported to death camps.
The film opens in “Quebec’s Eastern Townships region” in September of 1985 as we meet the troubled Melanie Lansing Winters (Susan Sarandon), still haunted by her youth spent in Drancy so much so that she’s taken to devoting her life to collecting data regarding each and every human atrocity committed around the globe. She catalogs them in numerous file cabinets with names, dates, and numbers in the hopes that people will never forget. Married to the cold and bitter professorial husband David Winters (played by Christopher Plummer), as Hearts begins, his mood has also hit an all-time low after he was forced into retirement from academia following a heart attack and plans to sue. Although he seems to blame his wife for her inability to forget the past and move on, her loving and devoted grown son Benjamin (Roy Dupuis) and grandson Timmy (Dakota Goyo) who also live at their large homestead treat Melanie with kid gloves, walking on eggshells and gently reminding her to take her antidepressant medication.
Prone to breakdowns and stress, Melanie seems utterly ecstatic when she manages to get in touch with Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow), the so-called “Poet of the Gulag,” who looked after her as a young girl in Drancy. After surviving the work camp, and later Auschwitz, and years of electroshock therapy in a psychiatric institution, he has finally been freed and agrees to come stay with Melanie in Canada for awhile. While her husband makes it clear that he’s less than thrilled that Melanie has invited what he fears is yet another most likely memory plagued, “emotionally unstable” survivor from the war to live with them, he’s in for a far ruder awakening when Jakob brings with him a surprise for Melanie. For instead of a trinket or bouquet, the gift arrives in the form of Christopher (Gabriel Byrne), another survivor from Drancy who — much like Sarandon’s character — had also lost his parents.
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