"Sophie" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL August 21, 1993 I've been on vacation and while I was away I saw a wonderful "women and film" film that hasn't played Tampa yet, but I hope it does. So, I thought I'd review it and hope some Tampa Bay film programmers will hear this and book the film here. The film in question is called "Sophie" and it is the directorial debut of the great Norwegian film star Liv Ullman whose brilliant screen performances in a score of Ingman Bergman films are classic- -who could forget her in "Persona" and "Cries and Whispers"--but whose occasional non-Bergman films sometimes verged on the ridiculous--who remembers "40 Carats?" Since 1977, Ullman's talents as a writer have been revealed in several books and now she is combining her writing and film interests by writing and directing a very remarkable first film that won the Best Film award at the Montreal Film Festival. "Sophie" is the true story of a real woman's life, specifically, a Jewish woman who lived in Denmark in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Though being Jewish makes her automatically an "Other" in her society, one of the interesting things about this film is that it is about the life of a woman who, for all intents and purposes, led a perfectly ordinary life for her time and place. She didn't do anything that would leave a mark on history, she just lived her life filled with sorrows and joys and daily routine as any life is. It is to Ullman's credit that she realizes that ordinary lives, too, in the right hands, can be the stuff of extraordinary films. So in this long, leisurely-pased film she slowly and patiently constructs this woman's life for us to experience and ponder. The film starts when Sophie (played by Karin-Lise Mynster) is in her late twenties, the loving, still unmarried, only daughter in a comfortable bourgeoise family whose Swedish father and Danish mother (Erland Josephson and Ghita Norby) are totally and endearingly in love with one another. Occasionally anti-Semitic slurs and gestures mar their peaceful and happy existence, but for the most part life is good. When Sophie meets a famous painter who (despite his own obvious anti-Semitism) falls passionately in love with her and finds a way to enter the family's life by undertaking a portrait of Sophie's parents, her life becomes more complex. Though she returns his passion, she cannot bring herself to so violate her family's wishes as to have an affair with him or to marry a non-Jew. She ends up marrying, instead, an odd distant cousin from a small town who gradually drifts into insanity, but not before they have a son who becomes the center of Sophie's life. She is forced by her husband's illness to take over the family business and does so for years with the help of her brother-in-law, who also suffers the effects of intense and intensely repressed sexual desire for Sophie and she for him. Her husband dies, she moves back to her parents' house, her son grows up, her relatives from her parents generation and finally her parents die, and her son sets out on his own life leaving her alone to live out her days running the family business. People's ordinary lives don't read like film plot summaries, there is no dramatic high point followed by a resolution, but there is a kind of inevitable cycle and it's this rhythm of life that this film captures. What provides the underlying tension is the audience's knowledge of what lies in store for European Jewry in the future. Sophie's son wants to abandon the traditional Jewish values and rituals that have been so lovingly preserved in Sophie's family over the years; he sees his future in assimilation. But we know what happened to Jews, assimilated or not, in the decades to come. Still this is Den- mark not Germany and despite the routine anti-semitism the film re- veals, when the crunch came Danish Jews were protected while Jews in most other European countries were not. "Sophie" is a film that is touching, entertaining, full of historical details, thought-provoking, and profound. There are a few loose ends and unclarities but they are minor flaws in an outstanding work of art. Ullman's many years with Bergman have taught her what she needs to know about filmmaking and she is, I think, a major talent as a writer/director. In "Sophie" she has given us a wonderful portrait of a woman's life. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. No portion of this review may be reprinted without permission of the author.