(Credit: YouTube still / Universal Pictures)
The titular phrase of the movie may have entered the cultural lexicon and become a byword for making an agonisingly difficult decision, but the scene in question from Sophie’s Choice has lost none of its power more than 40 years after the heart-wrenching drama’s release.
Featuring Meryl Streep in typically imperious form, the actor was on Academy Award-winning fire as Zofia Zawistowska, who tries to make a new life for herself in New York City in 1947 after escaping the horrors of World War II in her native Poland.
Peter MacNicol’s aspiring novelist Stingo grows increasingly close with both Sophie and Kevin Kline’s Nathan, not to mention his endless fascination with her story as a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks fill in the gaps in her past, but the title character continues to reckon with the aftereffects of the most haunting moment in her life.
Standing outside a German concentration camp with her children, Sophie is confronted with an unimaginable horror. The Nazi officer instructs her that only one of her children will be allowed to live, and it’s up to her to decide which one of them is spared.
Placed in an impossible predicament of choosing between Jennifer Lawn’s Eva or Adrian Kalitka’s Jan, Sophie is torn apart from the inside out after settling on the latter. It’s one of the most unforgettable, emotionally powerful, and gut-punchingly traumatising scenes in cinema, not that it was apparent to everyone involved in the production.
At the time, Lawn was only four years old when she was ripped from her on-screen mother’s arms and subjected to a desperate fate, and the youngster ended up filming the scene more than a dozen times. “Everybody was shocked because they thought they had only one take to make this happen,” she said per Entertainment Weekly. “They expected it the first time and that’s it, and they were able to do it 13 times.”
Although she was obviously aware that the setting was completely fictional, a four-year-old repeatedly being dragged out of their mother’s loving embrace and hauled out of shot was a difficult moment to relive over and over again. “I totally thought it was the end of the world,” Lawn admitted. “Absolutely. People tried to explain it to me, but I had such a bond with Meryl, so I think I got the whole emotional part of it. Just as she was getting more emotional and scared, so was I.”
Streep went all-out by learning Polish for Sophie’s Choice, but her youthful co-star didn’t need much encouragement to get into the required mindset when she was already so close to her scene partner. It remains one of the most nightmarish scenes to ever hit celluloid, but at least it didn’t leave any lasting damage on Lawn.
Related Topics
"Scene" - Google News
June 22, 2024 at 03:00PM
https://ift.tt/3EIhiZq
The story behind the iconic 'Sophie's Choice' scene: “I totally thought it was the end of the world” - Far Out Magazine
"Scene" - Google News
https://ift.tt/wMOBbqP
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment