Books, Arts & Manners: The Burden of Lightness

It takes an unappetizing mixture of arrogance and folly to make a film out of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book about as suited for cinematic treatment as, say, Sartre’s Words. What the director, Philip Kaufman, and his coscenarist, the ubiquitous Jean-Claude Carrière, have contrived is, you might say, the movie version of the jacket copy. Kundera’s later novels, this and the even more astounding Book of Laughter and Forgetting, have built-in booby traps for adapters. First, they emerge from an authorial monologue in which the plot and characters are treated as conveniences, mere pretexts for political speculations, existential philosophizing, epigrams, and games. Next, they are relentlessly elitist, literary, intellectual —presupposing a tidy packet of culture and sophistication from the reader. Lastly, their mode is ironic, making uncompromising fun of life and the people trying to master it with ideologies, beliefs, religions, and hopes. These books are calculated to ruffle every standard feather, to rub the conventional fur mercilessly wrong.

Any novel that abounds in poetic and witty descriptions should automatically be taboo to filmmakers, but Lightness goes way beyond that. Its main characters are not really Tomas, a middle-aged Czech brain surgeon and womanizer, Tereza, his guilelessly clinging and unsuccessfully undemanding wife, and Sabina, his off-and-on mistress—an experimental painter, experimental lover, and embodiment of assorted freedoms. The principals, in fact, are the absurdity of life, the ironies it pulls on us that can be met (and then only partially) with nothing but ironic detachment, and the kitsch that, however fastidiously avoided, lies in wait for us everywhere.

JS

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John Simon

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It takes an unappetizing mixture of arrogance and folly to make a film out of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book about as suited for cinematic treatment as, say, Sartre’s Words. What the director, Philip Kaufman, and his coscenarist, the ubiquitous Jean-Claude Carrière, have contrived is, you might say, the movie version of the jacket copy. Kundera’s later novels, this and the even more astounding Book of Laughter and Forgetting, have built-in booby traps for adapters. First, they emerge from an authorial monologue in which the plot and characters are treated as conveniences, mere pretexts for political speculations, existential philosophizing, epigrams, and games. Next, they are relentlessly elitist, literary, intellectual —presupposing a tidy packet of culture and sophistication from the reader. Lastly, their mode is ironic, making uncompromising fun of life and the people trying to master it with ideologies, beliefs, religions, and hopes. These books are calculated to ruffle every standard feather, to rub the conventional fur mercilessly wrong.

Any novel that abounds in poetic and witty descriptions should automatically be taboo to filmmakers, but Lightness goes way beyond that. Its main characters are not really Tomas, a middle-aged Czech brain surgeon and womanizer, Tereza, his guilelessly clinging and unsuccessfully undemanding wife, and Sabina, his off-and-on mistress—an experimental painter, experimental lover, and embodiment of assorted freedoms. The principals, in fact, are the absurdity of life, the ironies it pulls on us that can be met (and then only partially) with nothing but ironic detachment, and the kitsch that, however fastidiously avoided, lies in wait for us everywhere.