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120 reviews in total

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62 out of 81 people found the following review useful:
Utterly romantic, 17 February 2006

Author: francois chevallier (francheval@noos.fr) from Paris, France

Romanticism originally doesn't mean romance. The 19th century romantic hero was always a doomed one. The romantic characters long for something larger than life. The frailness, lightness of things is unbearable to those sensitive beings. This is why romantic stories typically end with the death of their heroes. Romanticism is the opposite of Hollywood, as there is no happy end. The epitome of a romantic story is for example "Romeo and Juliet", where death is preferred to an impossible love story.

Because such intense feelings are a threat, some people try to escape them by taking nothing seriously. For example, Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis), a young surgeon living in Prague in the late sixties. He is a perfect womanizer, but he never sleeps together with any woman, because he instinctively refuses any attachment. Such is also sensuous Sabina (Lena Olin), his favorite mistress and best friend, whose utmost erotic weapon happens to be... a bowler hat.

When Tomas is called for an operation at a small country spa, he seduces a young ingenuous waitress named Tereza (Juliette Binoche), but is not aware that she does not take things as lightly as he does. Bored to death with her provincial life, Tereza longs for something larger than life. She is vulnerable, sentimental, attaching. When she shows up by surprise at Tomas's apartment in Prague one evening, he lets her stay. He is trapped.

Neither of them suspects that they are living an intense moment in a crucial place. This is Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Eastern Block. But the winds of change are blowing in general enthusiasm, and Czechs believe that they are about to create " socialism with a human face". Encouraged by Sabina, Tereza becomes a photographer, and captures on film all the small daily life scenes, the beauty and uniqueness of every moment.

Tereza's caring love can't stop Tomas having affairs with "other women", much to her disarray. As she finally can't take it anymore, she decides to leave. But as she steps out on the dark streets, it sounds like an earthquake is coming. The Soviet tanks are entering the city. The reconstitution of Prague's invasion in this movie is extraordinarily intense, even more so as clips of the real events are included in the footage. Those few moments alone are strong enough to make this long movie worth seeing.

Tomas, Tereza and Sabina exile themselves to Geneva. Sabina has an affair with a married Swiss man, who "doesn't like bowler hats". As he eventually decides to leave his wife for her, she is very shaken, but she disappears. No attachment. It's lonely to be free. As for Tomas, Switzerland can't stop him either playing Casanova. Tereza still can't stand it, and she suddenly goes back to "the land of the weak". But I said it, Tomas is trapped. He can't live without her. He can't help following her back to Prague, although it's clear there is no future for them there anymore.

The story is an adaptation of a novel by much praised Czech novelist Milan Kundera, and it is one of those cases when the movie is more intense than the book. Whereas the movie is highly emotional, the book's tone is dry, cold, almost clinical.

Made by American director Philip Kaufman, this picture is European in every way. It captures perfectly well the "old world" nostalgic atmosphere of Czechoslovakia. The music score by Czech classical composers is gripping, sometimes melancholic, sometimes frantic. The lead actors are giving their all, and this film is certainly among their best performances for all three. The supporting cast also has some big European names in it (Erland Josephson, Daniel Olbrychski, Stellan Skarsgård). Cheerful performance by Czech actor Pavel Landovsky, who personally lived the Prague events. Here, he appears as a jolly and solid peasant with a pet pig called Mephisto, who follows him just everywhere, even at wedding parties!

Tomas and Tereza's pet is a she-dog called Karenin. She is the symbol of their love. They adopt her at the beginning of their relationship, take her together to Geneva, but as she escapes, Tereza takes her along back to Prague. As Karenin gets ill in the end, they make her a lethal injection so that she doesn't suffer. Pretty much what will happen to them too.

And well, I never knew bowler hats could be so erotic!

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60 out of 79 people found the following review useful:
Unbearably Beautiful - one of the best films ever made, 11 August 2001

Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

One of the most romantic films ever made, it shows the problems of people whose intimacies and personal conflicts are being interrupted by history on the move. I think this film surpasses the novel, which is utterly cynical (although understandably). Even in the last moments of the novel, Teresa is concerned that Tomas is cheating on her. The film also does well by dropping much of Franz's character - he was kind of uninteresting compared to Teresa, Tomas, and Sabina. It also drops such deadweight characters as Teresa's mother, Tomas' son, and Franz's wife. Also, a ton of different coworkers are combined into a few, so that their characters have time to develop. By concentrating on the three central characters, this film blossoms past what the novel ever achieved (although the novel is arguably more historically important). Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carriere also add a couple of beautiful scenes that weren't in the novel, including Tomas' and Teresa's wedding, which is one of the most beautiful scenes in filmdom.

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45 out of 55 people found the following review useful:
Moves You in a Totally Different Way, 4 July 2005

Author: triangulate from San Diego

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

A few weeks ago I decided to drive from San Diego to Michigan because my cat had died and I was depressed. On the road I listened to several books on CD, one of which was "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." The book intrigued me, partly because near the end, like me, Tomas and Tereza had to deal with a dying pet, but also because it dealt with big themes like love, sex and loyalty in a very unusual way. Along the way, almost incidentally, it shows you what life and politics were like in Czechoslovakia's "spring," before and after the Soviets moved forcibly back in the tanks.

So when I got back to San Diego one of the first things I did was rent the DVD of the movie. And I wasn't disappointed. First off, I think the movie is as faithful to a book as a movie could or should be, remembering that we're dealing with two different types of media. In the commentary on the CD, for example, the screenwriter explains they decided to leave out scenes with Tereza's mother because they realized that Juliette Binoche was communicating that part of the story merely by the way she (brilliantly) portrayed the character of Tereza.

Kundera's themes of lightness, heaviness, and repetition are very deep; I don't pretend to understand them completely. For me, it's enough that they intrigue, and the movie does them justice.

The acting of all the principals is astounding. I never had seen Lena Olin before, and I appreciated Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day Lewis more than ever.

And as much as I liked listening to the CD of the book, it did not make me cry at the end.

But the movie did.

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40 out of 52 people found the following review useful:
Memorable and beautifully done, 15 April 1999

Author: FANatic-10 from Las Vegas, NV

I've not read the book this is based on, so have no way to comment on how this movie translates it. But the film itself has stayed in my mind like few others. Yes, it's very long, but the characters are so memorable that the length didn't bother me at all - I loved the time spent in their company. In particular, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin are each astonishing in their own way. Olin is ferociously sensual and mesmerizing, while Binoche is superlatively sympathetic and sensitive. Two of the best female performances I can remember. By the end of the film I was totally wrapped up in these people's lives. This film is deeply erotic but in an intelligent and adult way that puts most other film's treatment of sex to shame. I thought it was beautifully handled by all concerned, and if I ever want to cry, I only need watch the scenes with the dog and the final scenes, both pulled off superbly.

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39 out of 53 people found the following review useful:
A wonderful Film, 19 January 2005

Author: njmollo from London

This is a great work. The Actors, director and all involved in this production should be very proud. It is wonderful Film.

The acting is pure and real. Juliette Binoche is truly a remarkable actor. Her desperation is beautifully played ( "I know he loves me."). Only a cold heart could not be moved by such a truthful performance. Daniel Day-Lewis plays his part with such realism, that he seems almost not to be acting. That is the art of his game. Lena Olin is outstanding. The scene in which she complains about the music is, I feel, a classic.

I love this film, and thats what it is, a film. Not a book. This Film seems to tap into something truly moving and touching. Thank you to all the crew involved. A Classic of Cinema.

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32 out of 46 people found the following review useful:
Unbearable Beauty and perfection...., 7 August 2006

Author: Roby Kurian from USA

Beautiful, Erotic, existential, anticommunist, humane are the words I pick up to describe the 'Unbearable lightness of being'. From the title, we assume that it is a bit philosophical, but much of the hardcore intellectual stuff has been omitted out as is inevitable in any movie adaptation but the director is faithful to Kundera's work.

This tells the interlocking stories of four relationships, Tereza and Tomas, Tomas and Sabina, Sabina and Franz, Franz and Marie-Claude-with a primary focus on Tomas, a man torn between his love for Tereza, his wife, and his incorrigible "erotic adventures," particularly his long-time affair with the internationally noted painter, Sabina told in the atmosphere of the communist invasion of Prague in the sixties. The Unbearable Lightness of Being examines the imperfect possibilities of adult love and the ways in which free choice and necessity shape our lives. Here, lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events. It is a world in which, because everything occurs only once and then disappears into the past, existence seems to lose its substance and weight. Coping with both the consequences of their own actions and desires and the interfering demands of society and the state, the characters struggle to construct lives of individual value and lasting meaning.

Day Lewis has played Tomas so brilliantly that in each and every shot, we see his womanizing thirst in his eyes and gestures. Juliette Binoche is the female lead, and Nykvists camera catches some beautiful angles of her body that this is the most beautiful feminine face and figure I have ever seen on screen. I do not know how to describe the photography. There are some sequences in mirror rooms and with morning fog which are very delicate and Nykvyst well captures the mood. The black and white footage about the Russian invasion is also brilliant.

Well directed, well acted and well designed, this is one of the best movie adaptations ever. My salutes to Nykvist, Kaufmann and the cast and definitely to Kundera.

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23 out of 36 people found the following review useful:
Just a love story, 16 July 2007

Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of those occasional attempts by American filmmakers to make a European art-house movie in English, in this case taking on an 'unfilmable' novel and trying to solve the problem of turning inner monologue into a credible narrative. Despite, or perhaps because of Jean-Claude Carriere's presence as co-writer with director Philip Kaufman, this tends to take the form of the odd conversation between shags rather than an attempt to turn ideas into images, leaving a rather conventional narrative about a philandering surgeon who ultimately needs the oppression of the Russian invasion rather than the freedom of the Czech Spring to focus his emotional commitments and principles. Some of this is done well, some of it less well, but at the end of the day it's just a love story, although it deals well with the personal consequences of the political crackdown and the ending is quietly moving. Which, in a way, reflects some kind of emotional triumph – whereas for most of the film we don't really care for the characters, merely go along with them, by the end, like he hero, we have at least attained some genuine level of emotional commitment.

Whether that entirely justifies 171-minutes of screen time is debatable, though in its defence the film never feels that long. There are moments that grate, not least the sporadically clumsy integration of the main characters into archive footage of the Russian invasion that draws attention to itself by the crude device of adding scratches only to the new footage. The photography session doesn't quite work either despite an interesting start, not quite pulling off the shift of power and veering off into self-indulgence. The performances are slightly problematic too, especially with the Czechs limited to the smaller supporting roles in an Anglo-French-Swedish-American cast leading to a variety of composite accents (often more Germanic than Slav) and a feeling that the casting directors thought "Yeah, he sounds foreign, he'll do" at times. Daniel Day Lewis fares well as the coldly charismatic and fickle doc but still hadn't shrugged off that well-trained British stage actor feel to his performances; Juliette Binoche is genuinely appealing in one of her more open performances, although it's a bit of a stretch that her character never loses her naiveté; but as the more passionate of his loves Lena Olin is somewhat more problematic, her performance getting less convincing as the film progresses until rediscovering its humanity in her final scene. Of the supporting players, Erland Josephon has one good scene as a former ambassador reduced to being a janitor that underlines the way that even love and sex can be used as weapons of political oppression merely through the introduction of doubt – an idea that becomes strangely more powerful because of the way Kaufman frequently fails to summon up much in the way of eroticism because he generally regards sex as joyfully comic.

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29 out of 48 people found the following review useful:
Only what is heavy has value, 25 July 2003
Author: Casey Machula (caseymachula@earthlink.net) from Flagstaff, AZ

Imagine you're at the theater attending a live performance, a truly living performance in which both axioms and mythological truths are entered into and shared by actors and audience alike. Now suppose that the backdrop for all the action is dark, oppressive, and heavy, while all that transpires before it is light, glib, and ineffectual. Now consider that, through the course of the play, all that is bouncy and trivial becomes overwhelmed and absorbed by the gravity of the background, like light being sucked into the gravity of a black hole, so that what was once meaningless and unimportant and even silly becomes increasingly momentous and important and valuable as the play progresses. If you can see this outline in your mind's eye, you have a good idea about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera's novel by the same name brought to life as a movie. The film, like the novel, declares one thing: `only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.' I so love this idea, this earth shattering insight: it effortlessly capsizes our Postmodern zeitgeist in one innocuous little phrase. And the film expresses it beautifully.

Set in the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Soviets put down Dubcek's `Socialism with a Human Face,' the weight of these events draws the lives of a Czech doctor, his wife, and his lovers, into its orbit. And instead of crushing them, as one might assume, it becomes the fire that purifies gold. Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), for example, had previously written a treatise on Oedipus, a witty exercise in sophistry aimed at the Communist regime as a provocative analogy, nothing more. But as the essay becomes an object of obsession to the Communists, we see Kundera's definition of vertigo come into play. It is not the fear of falling, but the soul's defense against the desire to fall. Tomas wanted to fall. Why? Watch the movie, and find out for yourself.

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29 out of 50 people found the following review useful:
Previous reviewer misunderstood movie..., 21 July 2003
Author: John from New York

I would have to disagree with the previous reviewer. First of all, the movie should have a "euro" feel to it because it's about Europeans, in Europe, and their European mentality. No car chases here, hot shot. That being said, I only have great praise for this film. It's a tremendous attempt to put to screen the subtle understanding Milan Kundera has of the human condition, and it surprisingly succeeds. For those more interested, I recommend you pick up some of his novels (start with a short story if you are pressed for time) and you, too, will realize why he is one of the best storytellers alive today.

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23 out of 39 people found the following review useful:
Sublime, 22 November 2000

Author: Equinexus from Washington DC

Well acted and well directed. An uninhibited examination of lust vs. love, and the comfort of monogamy vs. the prison of possessiveness without over-dramatization or false emotion. Kaufman's depiction is faithful to Kundera's work, even if some depth is lost, as is inevitable in any film adaptation of a novel.

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