Stream it:
|
Own it:
|
With: Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, Derek de Lint, Erland Josephson, Pavel Landovský, Donald Moffat, Daniel Olbrychski, Stellan Skarsgård
|
Written by: Jean-Claude Carrière, Philip Kaufman, based on a novel by Milan Kundera
|
Directed by: Philip Kaufman
|
MPAA Rating: R
|
Running Time: 171
|
|
Date: 02/05/1988
|
|
|
|
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Prop Hat
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
The same decade he made the equally great epic The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman also directed this brilliant adaptation of Milan Kundera's 1984 novel. Whereas the former film effortlessly pivoted between patriotism and cynicism, The Unbearable Lightness of Being effortlessly pivots between eroticism and history. (Kaufman is equally fascinated by both.)
Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a Czech doctor, and a gifted womanizer. (One of the first things we hear him say is to order a nurse to "take off your clothes.") He regularly sleeps with the sensual artist Sabina (Lena Olin), who wears a bowler hat during their lovemaking, as if to symbolize that she's playing a role. One day, while covering for a colleague, he travels to a country spa to perform a surgery, and spies the beautiful, shy serving girl Tereza (Juliette Binoche), and flirts with her. It's not long before she shows up at his door; he agrees to put her up for a night, but she winds up moving in. The trio begins to navigate their feelings of jealousy and desire, trying to find the balance between the "lightness of being" and the darkness.
That darkness comes in literal form when the Russians invade in August of 1968, and all three characters escape the country for the next chapter in their lives. Sabina begins another affair, while Tomas finds he can no longer practice medicine, since he refuses to apologize for an article he published that criticized Communism.
And so it goes, with Kaufman and legendary French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière — who previously worked with Luis Buñuel — continually weigh and consider all these elements, finding the humanity in both sex and in politics. It's an uncommonly mature, literate work, and one that embraces the erotic openly and without apprehension. (Kaufman would go on to do the same in his subsequent films Henry and June and Quills.) It received only two Oscar nominations, one for the adapted screenplay, and one for Sven Nykvist's rich cinematography. Saul Zaentz produced.
|
