MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Lightness of Being’ on the Heavy Side

Director-screenwriter Philip Kaufman certainly can’t be faulted for choosing easy source material. His last film was an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.” Now he’s taken on “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the fragmented, multilayered novel-of-ideas by emigre Czech author Milan Kundera. (Selected theaters.)

As usual, Kaufman has made a fine-looking film. He has cast the three points of his erotic triangle bravely and adroitly: the French Juliette Binoche as Tereza, the Swedish Lena Olin as Sabina and England’s current hot news, Daniel Day-Lewis, as the “epic womanizer” Tomas.

The production has the impeccable look that marks all of producer Saul Zaentz’s films (“Amadeus” et al.). And heaven knows, it has been approached with seriousness. But for all its real achievements, including a stomach-clutching re-creation of the Soviet invasion of Prague, and for all its uncoy acknowledgment of the power of sexuality, the film ultimately adds up to the unbearable heaviness of movie-making.

If Kundera has a style--and in fact he has a master’s array of them--it is a playful and ironic tone against which he sets his questions of fidelity/philandering, soul/body, and in this case, weight/lightness. Lightness here equates with a spontaneous, rootless life; heaviness, with a life soaked in commitment and in history. His book bristles with these warring points of view, each advanced with such airy eloquence that we are distracted from the suspicion that, as story alone, this is relatively thin stuff.

Kaufman and his co-adapter, the veteran Jean-Claude Carriere, have rendered it even thinner. They have peeled away virtually all of Kundera’s commentary and a damaging amount of his irony as well. For the film’s nearly three hours, we are left to study beautifully played but superficially drawn characters (with the exception of Tereza), coming closer and closer to the sentimentality which Kundera himself scorns.

In the film’s opening sequences, all appears to be well. As Kaufman introduces Tomas, the rakish young Prague surgeon; Sabina, “the only woman who understood him,” and the tremulous, instantly endearing Tereza, he uses a blithe, worldly tone that might have come from one of the Czech movies of the period--early 1968. Even the heroically silly first sexual encounter between Tereza and Tomas fits that Czech-movie mood.

Yet even with this perfect tone, we don’t really understand what is so unique about Tereza that Tomas departs from his sworn practice of not letting a woman stay the night--or even why he marries her.

Tomas-the-satyr loves Tereza; he knows that his tireless philandering causes her intense suffering, even nightmares, but he doesn’t stop. And here, the film’s focus changes. Tereza, who has taken up photography, alone seems to stand for something; she begins to pull ahead in our empathy, leaving the film decidedly unbalanced.

Now, however, one of the film’s two great set-pieces--the unerotic one--occurs. One night, as Tomas and Tereza wrangle, their apartment shudders under the weight of Soviet tanks squeezing down the narrow streets of Prague. Led by the blithely uncommitted Sabina, all three flee to Switzerland. Tereza’s blood-soaked pictures of the invasion come too late for a Swiss news agency. “Prague is over,” the news editor drawls. “But you have a terrific sense of the female body.”

So Tereza, needing work, clicks off roll after roll of Sabina’s fine athletic body, weeping at its loveliness. Then, using Tomas’ patented command, “Take off your clothes,” Sabina photographs Tereza as an electric intensity binds these two lovers of the same man.

It’s a gorgeous, sensual scene, although if there are photographers watching they’ll know it’s also the most monumental photo silliness since the studio romp in “Blow Up.” And it focuses on a powerful eroticism that begins to seem less and less erotic as the film unfolds and the characters, Tomas in particular, exhibit nothing but their sexual activity.

But “Unbearable Lightness” (rated R for nudity, sexual content) teeters on the edge of silliness and pretention more than once. The cast’s “Czech” accents, especially Daniel Day-Lewis’, are a sometime thing. Lena Olin’s Sabina and her far-too-omnipresent black bowler become an affectation, and while she is an arresting actress, she is also a ruefully mannered one. Surprisingly, the established Day- Lewis suffers most: Tomas remains so much the rake--even after the invasion--that his final commitment seems only temporary when it should feel like an apotheosis.

That leaves the field to Binoche’s translucent and affecting Tereza, whose choice to return to Prague and its suffering instead of remaining in Geneva with its superficiality is the final example of her depth. Binoche may be the film’s unqualified triumph.

Kaufman has shown great respect and feeling for another people’s history. In addition to Sven Nykvist’s evocative and sensual photography, the picture’s use of sound is exceptional. With Beatles songs and bird sounds, abruptly gone after the first tank, we become almost subliminally aware of the shift in mood between unoccupied and occupied Prague. If the same depth and richness had been lavished on the characters, this ambitious film might have been the moving experience it so clearly yearns to be.