#55: KAUFMAN, Philip: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (1988)

KAUFMAN, Philip (United States)

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being [1988]

Spine #55
DVD
OOP

Philip Kaufman achieves a delicate, erotic balance with his screen version of Milan Kundera's "unfilmable" novel. Adapted by Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carrière, the film follows a womanizing surgeon (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he struggles with his free-spirited mistress (Lena Olin) and his childlike wife (Juliette Binoche). An intimate epic, The Unbearable Lightness of Being charts the frontiers of relationships with wit, emotion, and devastating honesty.

172 minutes
Color

Stereo

1:85:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 1999

Director/Writers

Based on the novel by Milan Kundera.

Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Philip Kaufman.

Kaufman was 52 when he directed The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Film

A 90-minute film can drag on and make you feel like you just wasted a whole day.

A three-hour film can make you feel like 180 minutes just flew by.

It is purely a Hollywood convention that set the 100-minute mark for commercial films to get audiences in and out and sell as much popcorn as possible.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of those three-hour films where one would have a hard time pointing out any scene with which the viewer could “do without.”

There are a slew of excellent pre-1968 Czech films in this Collection: an entire Eclipse box set (Series 32); Milos Forman, Ján Kadár, Jirí Menzel, Frantisek Vláčil, and Jan Nemec — who became Kaufman’s advisor to all things Czech, for this production.

He was there in ‘68, filming the tanks — a role he recreates here, including a scene where he is seen bruised and getting drilled by his Soviet-Czech inquisitors on his involvement..

When Kaufman made this film in 1986-87, Czechoslovokia was still an occupied country. By the time of its release in 1988, freedom was still a few years in the future.

Philip Kaufman took on the project of the “unfilmable” novel by Kundera, who later disowned his involvement and stated that he would allow no future work of his to be subject to cinematic interpretation. Hmmph. In just under three hours, we get the gist of the novel, despite the lack of Kundera’s philosophic musings and the scenes repeated from different POVs …

The “lightness of being” is evident in Tomas (a spectacular Daniel Day-Lewis) from the very start, when he picks up a nurse at the spa-hospital where he does brain surgery. We meet one of his recovering patients, Pavel (Pavel Landovsky) — with his pet pig — who will figure in the story, hours later …

(another perfect example of a “lightness of being” character is François in Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) {Spine #420}) …

He meets Tereza (Juliette Binoche) at the spa, but he can’t manage to sleep with her because he must return to Prague. She will chase him back to the city.

The character of Tereza represents one meaning of the “unbearable” of the title. She ultimately cannot deal with Tomas and his “lightness” until they marry, he stops sleeping around, and they move to the country after the horrors of their lives in ‘68.

Sabina (the gorgeous Lena Olin) is perhaps the “lightest” character of all — or is she just pure “being”? She certainly is comfortable in her own self, forming and denying relationships with barely a twitch of her eyes. Franz (Derek de Lint) is one such casualty. She is one of those cinematic self-assured women of the highest order.

The music of Leoš Janáček permeates the entire film to great effect. Filmed in France (Lyon stood in for Prague), Kaufman checks every box. The dialogue is perfection, the acting phenomenal and with Sven Nykvist behind the camera, what could go wrong?

After three credits (Producer, Director, Title) 0:00:40, Kaufman puts up a superfluous intertitle, “In Prague, in 1968, there lived a young doctor named Tomas . . .” He seduces a nurse, then a second intertitle informs us that “the woman who understood him best was Sabina . . .”

There follows a fabulous two-minute uncut take of Tomas and Sabina in bed. Kaufman’s use of long takes infuses this film with actor-bonding, as he says in the commentary.

A third intertitle tells us that Tomas is going to the spa-hospital, which we plainly see onscreen. Perhaps Kaufman felt these helped set up the saga — silent-film style — or perhaps he wanted to get anything expository out of his system immediately. They’re all unnecessary.

Kaufman/Carrière’s script is brimming with complex and humorous scenes like this one:

Tomas has stopped to watch some old men playing chess on a floating board in the swimming pool. A few moves, they hit the clocks and suddenly the board shakes, the black king falls over (representing Tomas, says PK in commentary) … as his opponent looks to see what happens (Tereza has dived in, creating a wake), the other player cheats and moves his rook one space over. Kaufman cuts back and forth between the men, Tereza gliding under the water, and Tomas’s greedy look, as he leers at her shadow while she changes clothes. While the chess kibitzers argue, one of them upends the entire board into the water.

The most fascinating scene of all involves dozens of actors and musicians in a superbly edited dance on film (Walter Murch, who edited Coppola’s films so convincingly). Tomas, his two women, and two male colleagues from work are seated at a table. At a nearby table, Soviet functionaries and Czech stooges are making toasts and speeches to each other. The band is playing an imitation of rock and roll. Young people are dancing and making out.

While Tomas delivers his Oedipus Rex tale of analogy (the Czech collaborators are sleeping with their mother [Russia], have killed their own father [country] and put their eyes out to avoid seeing it all), Kaufman’s camera zig-zags between his group, the Russians, the band and the crowd, catching a facial expression here, a reaction there …

Then — in a feat of beautifully timed editing — he captures the actions of the Soviet official who asks the band to play the anthem, the dancers leaving the floor, the reactions at Tomas’s table — and then when the band turns the dour hymn into hybrid rock and roll, the young Czechs go crazy and the Russians get up and leave in a huff.

Wonderful scene.

The other possible link to the title’s meaning is perhaps Tomas himself, who returns to Prague to reunite with Tereza after they had previously successfully escaped to Switzerland. Tomas can no longer stand the “lightness.” His love for his wife — and perhaps his decimated country — made it all too heavy to bear any longer.

His “lightness” will return when they move to the country. Tereza, digging weeds in the garden, her hands black with dirt, exchanges a glance with Tomas, driving a tractor and lifting his arms up to the sky, as if to say — now we can be happy.

As if.

Film Rating (0-60):

58

The Extras

Not much. An insert and commentary. But this is an early spine # …

The Booklet

Six-page wraparound featuring a short essay by Michael Sragow.

“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 friend’s 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.”

Commentary

By director Kaufman, co-writer Carrière, editor Murch and actor Olin.

Kaufman talks about his collaborations, the importance of the Janáček, and the labor of love that went into the invasion scene, a devastating mixture of real footage, insertion of the actors into such footage, newly shot footage to match, and the use of going from color to black and white, and freeze-framing.

He also admits that he had planned to use intertitles throughout the entire film. He ended up leaving only the three at the beginning.

Notice how Tereza and Tomas are arguing when a low hum invades the soundtrack. You might not even notice it until he films the shaking whiskey glasses.

Carrière talks about the Czech sense of humor and eroticism as tools of resistance to oppression … he hints at a tough job of working with Kaufman on the screenplay. Both writers, however, insist over and over again that Kundera was happy with it all (despite his later protestations) …

Murch on Binoche:

“You could search the earth for an actress like this … somehow fate delivered her to us.”;

Olin talks about how she shaped the character by careful readings of the book.

Her paintings were done by Irena Dedicova. Years later, Olin would become Irina Derevko on Alias.

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

58 + 35 =

93

By Director
By Spine #