The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

Directed by: Phillip Kaufman | 172 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Daniel Day Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, Derek de Lint, Erland Josephson, Donald Moffat, Pavel Landovsky, Daniel Olbrychski, Stellan Skarsgård, Pascale Kalensky

Imagining with language is essentially different from telling with images; a novelist may therefore have greater power than a film-maker. He can make his characters dance at his command and change their proportions endlessly, until he has exposed everything in such a way that the reader can finish the work: the novelist is a superior puppeteer. Milan Kundera masters this work to perfection in his novel ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Existence’. His exploration of human action in love (free or romantic) and under dictatorship (adjust or hold back) he did through four characters – two men and two women – each representing a pole of the moral spectrum, but never be completely pure. The four main characters relate in a symmetrical ambiguity. Tomas is adulterous but ruins his career because he does not want to succumb to the communists; Tereza is morally pure in love but is not free because of her bondage; Sabina is but runs away from love; the western professor Franz (Derek de Lint) believes in true love as much as in leftist ideals, but cheats on his wife with Sabina and is a salon socialist.

The credibility of the novel’s characters is supported by telling their life stories and philosophical reflections on the difference between art and kitsch.

Just imitate that in a movie; Philip Kaufman tried that too. The plot follows the book closely and Kaufman knew that 170 minutes really wasn’t too long. It’s not, but the characters are just shadows of what they are in the book. Despite an excellent cast, which makes this film memorable, the makers fail to turn the complicated duality of the main characters into a tragic one. The film is a maximum representation of the book rather than a superior substitute; the characters are oversimplified.

The book seems unfilmable because the plot alone is not enough and to include all the essential details would require too long a film. But the actors do their very best. Those who see the film before reading the book will never get rid of the faces of Day-Lewis, Binoche and Olin, who are truly perfectly cast in the rich pool of European cinema. This, along with the beautiful Bergman-style graphics, is the raison d’être for this film, which has a formidable tagline: ‘a lovers story’.