U.S.A. drama
1988
color 171 min.
Director: Philip Kaufman
CLV: $69.95 - available
           2 discs, catalog # CC1509L
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profoundly beguiling movie about sex, love and
rebellion. Its lead characters caper through Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia's 1968 version of
the Summer of Love, and then try to withstand the effects of Soviet occupation. They achieve
an offhand grandeur. As they drop verbal bombshells about the murderous duplicity of politics
and the uglification of the universe, they never lose their ardor or originality. All they want
to rule them is passion.
In his novel, Milan Kundera describes his neurosurgeon hero, Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), as an
"epic" Don Juan, "prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female
world." In the movie, Philip Kaufman, who cowrote and directed, succeeds in making Tomas' two
key relationships -- with his waif-like wife Tereza (Juliette Binoche), and an independent
artist, Sabina (Lena Olin) -- embody that infinite variety.
When asked why novelists don't often make great playwrights, Kurt Vonnegut said, "It's because
they don't know that theater is dance." That notion applies triply to the kinetic art of movies.
The triumph of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is that Kaufman and company choreograph the
diverse segments of Kundera's fiction like a folk dance, a rock musical, and a pastoral ballet.
You could say that Tomas is a non-dancer who does one heartbreaking dance, with his wife, before
he dies. The key scene (politically and personally) comes before he marries Tereza or dances with
her. During Prague Spring, Communist officials glower as a student crowd at a nightclub bops to
Buddy Holly. Tereza, not Tomas, takes to the floor -- and her joy as she bounces around with another
man makes Tomas jealous enough to marry her. It's one of the novel's few unexplained paradoxes.
Tomas, the keen, voracious sensualist who cuts into the brain at work and caresses the female body
every chance he can get, doesn't care to dance. Tereza, who's mystified by the power of her body,
can release herself on the dance floor.
The way Kaufman handles the paradox, it's the stuff of existential romance. In
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, opposites attract and fulfill each other. In 1987,
Daniel Day-Lewis told me that he got a handle on Tomas by seeing him "as a scientist, who's fearful
of the things that can't be rationalized by science and so on. And that is the tension of the story.
Because falling in love, for people like him, is the equivalent of falling off a fifteen-story
building. It's not something he's readily equipped to deal with. He's managed to equate his conquest
of women with his need to conquer the world -- as if he's a scalpel cutting open the prostrate
body." Binoche said she saw Tereza as a woman obsessed with the mystery of nakedness, a romantic
who wrestles with how little or how much her body reveals of her soul: "I thought that being
naked, for Tereza, would have been a mistake, because it was a mystery, a secret. And if you show
that secret, there's no Tereza." As Tomas, Day-Lewis is an acute amorous observer: you can tell
how much love he holds for his wife when you see the way his eyes drink her in. And as Tereza,
Binoche incarnates devotion and sheepish intimacy with instinctiveness and brio. You understand
why a man would chuck a cushy life for her -- why, having escaped from Prague to Switzerland
after the '68 Soviet invasion, Tomas follows her when she goes back.
It's not surprising that Kaufman, the director of movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and The Right Stuff, would pick up on Kundera's ironies and emotional shadings. What's
amazing is how marvelously he realizes them. When Tereza finds Soviet-occupied Prague almost
terminally dispiriting, she uproots Tomas once again, to an isolated farm where they and their
dog Karenin befriend the commune chief and his pet pig. And here, of all places, they achieve
marital bliss. On what we know will be the last night of their lives, in a country inn, Tereza
balances her feet on Tomas' and they dance toward the door of their room.
Improbably but persuasively, Sabina serves as a bridge between Tomas and Tereza, and between them
and the audience: She's as conscious of nuance as Tomas, and as intuitive as Tereza. Olin gives
a protean performance, notable not merely for its sensual breadth but also for its empathy. We
appreciate both Tomas and Tereza more when we see them through Sabina's eyes.
Olin makes the euphoria and heartbreak of the climactic sequence possible. When Kaufman and
Carrière, in a variation on the novel's flash-forwards, show us Sabina learning of her friends'
deaths, Olin's ruminative grief is soul-shaking, not tear-jerking. Kaufman consummates Kundera's
description of the final scene: "The sadness was form, the happiness content." His film of The
Unbearable Lightness of Being is a sublime dance of death and life.
-- Michael Sragow
Cast
Tomas: Daniel Day-Lewis
Tereza: Juliette Binoche
Sabina: Lena Olin
Franz: Derek de Lint
Ambassador: Erland Josephson
Pavel: Pavel Landovsky
Chief surgeon: Donald Moffat
Interrogator: Daniel Obrychski
Engineer: Stellan Skarsgard
Credits
Directed by Philip Kaufman
Produced by Saul Zaentz
Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Philip Kaufman
Based on the novel by Milan Kundera
Director of photography: Sven Nykvist, A.S.C.
Supervising film editor: Walter Murch
Costume design: Ann Roth
Production design: Pierre Guffroy