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Rating: New York 1947. Stingo (a very young Peter McNicol) arrives in New York with a dream to fulfill. There he befriends a couple: the charming Nathan (Kevin Kline) and Sophie (Meryl Streep), an extraordinary Polish woman who survived the Holocaust.
Sophie notices Stingo'sinnocence and ability to listen, and then starts to talk with him, to reveal all that torments and devours her inside. In a series of chilling flashbacks, Sophie, slowly, over various moments, tells her story, from the least traumatic event up to the terrible “choice” that will mark her forever.
Sophie’s sense of guilt emerges, immediately, in all its cruelty and madness.
In the end, the woman will let Stingo love her, but only for one night. Then she will return to her Nathan. She understood Stingo’s sincere love for her - and any other “normal woman” would have thrown herself into his arms in front of such sincerity - but her sense of guilt is so great that she feels unworthy of receiving such free love. With Nathan she will perform a self-destructive act with which she will punish herself definitively.
The greatest film on guilt I have ever seen, because it doesn’t simply describe guilt, as many films do, but the most terrible guilt: that of a believer: “Christ has turned His face away from me. Jesus has no interest in me (….) He has left me to live with my guilt”.
Immense Meryl Streep, capable of speaking Polish, German (with a Polish accent), and English (with a Polish accent), in what is generally considered the greatest female performance of all time, and which, as she said, “brought me to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion”. The “choice” scene was filmed by Streep in a single take, because, “being too painful”, she refused to film it a second time. Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 1982.
Absurd instead is the undervaluation of the film, which was only nominated,without winning, in the “Best Adapted Screenplay” category.
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