Theatre
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (`18', Empire Leicester Square)
On the heavy side
Hilary Mantel
The novel by Milan Kundera on which this film is based is an elegant, sauntering narrative, which gives the reader plenty of time to admire the scenery along the route: to note the allusions and coincidences which signpost the path, and to sense the flow of metaphor beneath the surface of events. The style is oblique, digressive, but always perfectly easy to follow, enlivened by playful metaphysical speculation and by comedy that is at once spritely and judi- cious. Director Philip Kaufman is a•brave man to attempt to translate it to the screen, and he succeeds creditably in many re- spects. If he has failed alrfiost entirely to catch the book's tone, that is exactly the failure one might predict.
The love story at the narrative's heart begins in the 'Prague Spring' of 1968. Tomas is a distinguished surgeon and obsessive womaniser. He has a mistress called Sabina, an artist, who fears commit- ment as much as he does, and who eccen- trically prefaces their sex sessions by don- ning a bowler hat. Tomas has designed his life, Kundera says, 'in such a way that no woman could move in with a suitcase'; but on a brief visit to a provincial spa, he meets Tereza, a waitress, and when she turns up at his apartment he finds that he cannot discard her easily. He hardly knows his own mind: if one had two lives, he thinks, one could pronounce on the wisdom of alternative courses of action, but our one- shot existence is a pointless business. Ein- mal ist keinmal.
They marry; the Russians move in; they leave for Switzerland. But even after they have been together for seven years, Tereza feels that she is impeding Tomas, weighing him down. She returns to Prague; he follows; their passports are taken away at the border. Years earlier, Tomas had written a letter to a newspaper, criticising the Communist Party; now it is held against him. He will not retract his state- ments, so he loses his job, descending the medical hierarchy, then becoming a window-cleaner; finally he and Tereza escape the oppressive atmosphere of the capital, become farm workers and find happiness, of sorts, before their untimely, accidental death.
In the film the complicated time-scheme has, necessarily, become linear. What we lose by this is the agreeable melancholy which pervades the novel; in the book we are told, before the halfway point, of the time and manner of the couple's death. What the director gives us instead of melancholy is gloom. During the Geneva episodes, for instance, the film is be- calmed, the mood so sombre that we cannot discern the 'lightness' which alarms Tereza and sends her back to the prison of her native land and the 'workaday humilia- tion' that the Russians inflict on it. We are given tragedy, but no irony, and certainly no jollity; there is no hint here of the unexpected liberation that Tomas finds in his window-cleaner's life, when his former patients greet him with champagne and strange women take off their clothes for him. The novel's vision of life's absurdity is conveyed, but absurdity here is never benign.
And as for the politics: the film's charac- ters are stereotypical Eastern Europeans, who emerge from their apartments to bandy inflammatory platitudes in cafés against a background of subversive jazz. The invasion, that 'carnival of hate', pro- vides the film's most memorable sequ- ences, employing striking newsreel foot- age; but the device of intruding the major characters into a pretended newsreel, so that they seem to be present at each demonstration and incident, is vulgar and patronising to the viewer. The self- absorbed, sardonic Tomas is no street- fighting man. He is not a willing hero; his heroism, like so much else in his life, is fortuitous. This is the film's major misjudg- ment, and it takes an axe to the subtleties of the text. The novelist makes his idiosyn- cratic, unforced connections between the intimate and the public act, but the direc- tor has a heavier hand.
Yet for most of its three hours the film is quite absorbing. Daniel Day-Lewis seems young for the part of Tomas, the comman- ding sensualist of 40 — and indeed the film gives us little sense of the passage of the years — but his performance is thoughtful and interesting. Juliette Binoche is a skilful and imaginative young actress, and she catches exactly Tereza's candour, vulner- ability and fragile charm. Sven Nykvist's photography is distinguished; one imagines how a cinematographer must cudgel his brains when required to come up with something original by way of rural idyll. The film is well worth seeing, but less for its handling of grand themes than for its small felicities and incidental pleasures.
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