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Sophie's Choice (film)

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I was sent to Auschwitz because they saw that I was afraid.

Sophie's Choice is a 1982 American romantic drama film about a Polish immigrant, Sophie, and her tempestuous lover who share a boarding house with a young writer in Brooklyn.

Directed and written by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel of the same name by William Styron.
Between the innocent, the romantic, the sensual, and the unthinkable. There are still some things we have yet to imagine.

Sophie Zawistowska

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  • Mmm. You know, when you... when you live a good life... like a saint... and then you die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise.
  • So, we'll go to that farm tomorrow. But please, Stingo, don't talk about marriage and children. It's enough that we'll go down there on that farm to live... for a while.
  • My father. How can I explain how much I loved my father? My father believed that human perfection was possibility. Every night, I pray to God, to forgive me for always making a disappointment to my father. And I pray to him - to make worthy of such a great, good man. I was a grown woman. I was wholly come of age. I was a married woman when I realized that I hate my father beyond all words to tell it.

Nathan Landau

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  • [about Sophie] When I first met this one here, she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year-and-a-half after the Russians had liberated the camp she was in.
  • Don't you see, Sophie? We're dying.
  • You spent the whole fucking afternoon with him, or should I say, you spent the whole afternoon fucking him.
  • This toast is in honor of my disassociation of you two creeps. Disassociation from you, coony captive cunt of King's county. And you, the dreary dregs of Dixie.
  • On this bridge on which so many great Americans writers stood and reached out for words to give America its voice... looking toward the land that gave them Whitman... from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words... on this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote, we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods... whose words are all we know of immortality. To Stingo!

Stingo/Narrator

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  • It was 1947, two years after the war, when I began my journey to what my father called the Sodom of the north, New York. They called me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all.
  • I was twenty-two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at last the goddess of my unending fantasies. My lust was inexhaustible. Sophie's lust was both a plunge into carnal oblivion, and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see it was a frantic attempt to beat back death.
  • How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous mind and life-enlarging mentor. Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous.
  • And so ended my voyage of discovery in a place as strange as Brooklyn. I let go the rage and sorrow for Sophie and Nathan, and the many others who were but a few of the butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. When I could finally see again, I saw the first rays of daylight reflected in the murky river. This was not Judgement Day, only morning. Morning, excellent and fair.

Other

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  • SS Doctor: Can you imagine? My father asked me what kind of medicine I practice here. What can I tell him? I perform God's work. I select who shall live and who shall die. Is that not God's work?

Dialogue

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You may keep one of your children.
You are a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege, a choice.
This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
Sophie: Stingo, you look... you look very nice, you're wearing your cocksucker.
Stingo: That's my "seersucker."
Stingo: [groping interrupted] What is going on!
Leslie Lapidus: You don't understand. I can't go all the way. I've reached a plateau in my analysis. Before I reached this plateau of vocalization, I could never have said any of those words. Those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everybody should be able to say, and now I'm completely able to vocalize.
Stingo: [narrating] Leslie Lapidus could say fuck, but she could not do it.
Sophie: My mother, she's very sick, you know. And I can't do anything. But I think — if only I could have got — that meat for my mother it would make her strong. So I go to the country and er... the peasants were selling ham and I buy it with the black market money and I bring it back. But it's forbidden, you know, because all the meat goes to the Germans. So I sat on the train and I hid it under my skirt, I am pretending that I am pregnant, you know? Oh I was so afraid. I was shaking. And then the German, was in front of the train and he saw me. So he come over and take under my skirt that ham and... So they sent me Auschwitz.
Stingo: You were sent to Auschwitz because you stole a ham?
Sophie: No, I was sent to Auschwitz because they saw that I was afraid.
Stingo: I bet your father is a - very interesting man.
Sophie: Yeah, my father was - a civilized man. That's a word, yeah? "Civilized"?
Nathan Landau: A very good word.
Sophie: Yeah? My father was a civilized man living in a uncivilized time. The civilized, they was the first to die.
SS officer: You're so beautiful. I'd like to get you in bed. Are you a polack? You! Are you also one of those filthy communists?
Sophie: I am a Pole! I was born in Cracow! I am not a Jew. Neither are my children! They're not Jews. They are racially pure. I am a Christian. I am a devout Christian.
SS officer: You are not a communist? You are a believer.
Sophie: Yes sir, I believe in Christ.
SS officer: You believe in Christ the redeemer?
Sophie: Yes.
SS officer: Did He not say... "Suffer the children, come unto me?" You may keep one of your children.
Sophie: I beg your pardon?
SS officer: You may keep one of your children. The other must go away.
Sophie: You mean, I have to choose?
SS officer: You are a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege, a choice.
Nathan Landau: Tell me. Tell me, Sophie. The same anti-Semitism for which Poland has gained such a worldwide renown that this similar anti-Semitism guide your own destiny, help you along, protect you in a manner of speaking so you became one of the minuscule, handful of people who lived - while the millions died? Tell me. Tell me why? Explanation, please! Tell me why, old lucky number 11379, tell me, why you inhabit the land of the living? What splendid little tricks and strategems sprang from that lovely head of yours to allow you to breath the clear Polish air? While the multitudes at Auschwitz choked - slowly - on the gas?
Sophie: No!
Nathan Landau: Explain!
Sophie: Stop it!
Nathan Landau: Explain!
Stingo: You tried to commit suicide in Auschwitz?
Sophie: No, it was after that. After that, I was in, um... After liberation.
Stingo: After you were safe?
Sophie: Yes, safe, yeah. I was safe, I was in Sweden. I was in that, uh, refugee camp. I mean, that was good. They try to help you, you know? They try to... they try... but... I knew that... Christ had turned his face away from me... and that only a Jesus who no longer cared for me could... kill those people that I love, but... leave me alive... with my shame? Oh, God. So I went to that church... and I took the glass. I knelt down and I... cut my wrist. But I didn't die, of course! Of course not. Stingo... there's so many things you don't understand. There's so many things that I can't... that I cannot... tell you.
Stingo: Sophie, I want to understand. I'd like to know the truth.
Sophie: The truth does not make it easier to understand, you know. I mean, you think that you find out the truth about me, and then you'll understand me. And then you would forgive me for all those... for all my lies.
Stingo: I promise, I'll never leave you.
Sophie: You must never promise that. No one, no one should ever promise that. Ah, the truth, ah, the truth, I don't even know what is the truth - after all these lies I have told.
Stingo: Well, I love you very much, Sophie. And I want to marry you. I want you to live down there on that farm with me. When I write my books there, I want you to help me and I want you to help me raise a family because I love you very, very much. Is it too much to hope that you might love me, too?
Sophie: Listen, Stingo, I'm beyond 30 years now, you know. What are you going to do with an old Polish lady like me?
Stingo: Manage. I'll Manage. "Old woman". Don't talk that way. You're always going to be my number one.

Quotes about Sophie's Choice

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Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie. It is about three people who are faced with a series of choices, some frivolous, some tragic. As they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, they become our friends, and we love them. ~ Roger Ebert
  • Sometimes when you've read the novel, it gets in the way of the images on the screen. You keep remembering how you imagined things. That didn't happen with me during Sophie's Choice, because the movie is so perfectly cast and well-imagined that it just takes over and happens to you. It's quite an experience. … The movie, like the book, is told with two narrators. One is Stingo, who remembers these people from that summer in Brooklyn, and who also remembers himself at that much earlier age. The other narrator, contained within Stingo's story, is Sophie herself, who remembers what happened to her during World War II, and shares her memories with Stingo in a long confessional. Both the book and the movie have long central flashbacks, and neither the book nor the movie is damaged by those diversions, because Sophie's story is so indispensable to Stingo's own growth, from an adolescent dreamer to an artist who can begin to understand human suffering.
  • We almost don't notice, at first, as Stingo's odyssey into adulthood is replaced, in the film, by Sophie's journey back into the painful memories of her past. The movie becomes an act of discovery, as the naive young American, his mind filled with notions of love, death, and honor, becomes the friend of a woman who has seen so much hate, death, and dishonor that the only way she can continue is by blotting out the past, and drinking and loving her way into temporary oblivion. … Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie. It is about three people who are faced with a series of choices, some frivolous, some tragic. As they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, they become our friends, and we love them.
    • Roger Ebert, in his review in The Chicago Sun-Times (1 January 1982)]

Cast

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