Sophie's Choice (1982)

Watched 'Sophie's Choice' on Netflix.

A great movie. Thanks mostly to Meryl Streep.
(Styron wrote the novel with someone else in mind for the part of Sophie, and a Slovak actress was also considered. Meryl Streep was very determined to get the role. After obtaining a bootlegged copy of the script, she went after Pakula, the director and threw herself on the ground, begging him to give her the part)

A Polish woman and her lover, who gave her a new life after her return from the German concentration camps, become friendly with a newly arrived writer from the South, a fellow boarder, residing in their apartments in Brooklyn.

Nathan, sophie's lover is tempestuous. Sophie loves him, she is grateful to him, but more importantly she understands how much he needs her and tolerates his occasional but fierce outbursts.

Stingo, the fellow boarder who becomes a great friend to both, in time, falls in love with sophie, but has to be content with a few quiet moments and conversations he is able to have with her.

At last, Nathan's extremes, combined with her emotional scars left by her experiences in the concentration camps become too much for sophie, just as his own lack of control over his temper and his menial job, though a well guarded secret, become too much for Nathan to bear and the two end their lives.

The scene in Auschwitz, where Sophie had to choose between her son and her daughter for extermination, not allowed to have both, brought tears to my eyes. I fought them back. I am not sure if the fact of her choosing to keep her son and her letting go of the daughter, who is the younger child, is of any significance. Is this the choice that is the subject of the movie?
There is the other choice.
She chooses to go back to Nathan, who gave her a new life, who needed her, even though it meant death, when she could have chosen a quiet life with Stingo in the south.
It is this choice perhaps.
Or may be both.

I prefer to see the horror of the war in glimpses this way, than in movies dedicated entirely to war. That would be too much for me.

Cultural distinctions go a long way in making movies interesting. So it is in this movie. The southern drawl of Stingo, the accent of the Polish Sophie still learning English - it is these that you will find charming.

The viewer's attention is drawn to the feature of the Southern accent in the movie by a mocking imitation of it by Nathan on Stingo's face. If it was intended by the director for the same purpose, then, it was very thoughtful on his part, for otherwise, the accent might have gone unnoticed.

It's amazing just how much weight Meryl Streep lost for the scenes depicting Auschwitz concentration camps and the make up that made her look anaemic and anorexic.

There was a time, when America was as conservative...
When Stingo proposes marriage to Sophie, she is reluctant because she is an old woman who is 30 years. What would you do with an old woman like me, she asks.

When she agrees to give it a chance, to live in with him, but asks him not to hurry about marriage, Stingo says it wouldn't be possible in the little town in the south, they are all Christians there, and to live together we would have to be married!

A beautiful line I couldn't help noting down.
"It's terrible to outlive the people that you love..."

#westerncinema