The Unbearable Lightness of Being Review

The Soviet invasion arrives at the midpoint, and Kaufman cuts freshly shot black and white footage of Juliette Binoche photographing the tanks into real 1968 newsreel so carefully that the seams do not show. It is the high point of a film that otherwise runs a long way past its own ideas. Sven Nykvist lights everything in warm browns and skin, and the sequence in which Sabina and Tereza photograph each other in a borrowed flat, moving from professional distance to something neither will name, is the most patient erotic scene of its decade.

Lena Olin is the reason it works. Her Sabina is funny, hard and unsentimental, and she exposes Tomas as the passive figure he is, a surgeon who treats his own compulsions as weather he cannot be blamed for. Kundera's novel is built on digressions about weight, kitsch and eternal return, and almost none of that survives the adaptation, which leaves a handsome love triangle stretched across one hundred and seventy one minutes.

The Geneva exile section could lose twenty minutes and gain from it. The final drive along a wet road at night, though, is a quiet and exact piece of dread.