The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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 co-scenarist, the ubiquitous Jean-Claude Carriere, 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.

Essentially, then, we are charmingly inveigled into a dialogue with a writer who, frequently talking in the first person, keeps reminding us that his fiction is a kind of probe, and inviting us to join in his racy ontological investigation. To take a few handfuls of plot elements and dialogue from the book, add one's own narrative strokes, and turn the whole thing into a linearly forward-thrusting typical movie is as alien, indeed antithetical, to Kundera's purpose and spirit as would be transferring it all to the court of Heliogabalus or Caligula.

The author's main point is that life is "an unbearable lightness" in both the good and the bad sense, largely because those very terms are too relative to have much meaning. Out of our good intentions come disasters; out of our attempts at righteous retaliation comes, generally, nothing. This is the unbearable irony of life. Out of our attempts to rise above contingency, to float above vulgar causality, comes sticky, inextricable involvement. Our lightness turns into heaviness, our refined superiority into kitsch. And there is no assigning value to any of our actions, because life affords us only the one chance of doing them this way, leaving no basis for comparison with any other way.

Such an ironic view of life comes naturally to Kundera, a Czech exile, who was first stripped of his passport, then of his past works and the right to publish future ones, and, finally, of his very identity, being declared a non-person. So life, for the contemplative mind, becomes unbearably ironic, unreal, "light"--a joke (The Joke is the title of one of Kundera's novels). But this airiness, insubstantiality, lightheadedness may be preferable to any attempt to make life heavy and regimented, the ballast totalitarian regimes foist on it. And out of a novel-essay-treatise that keeps going off on meditative tangents and revels in aphoristic asides, Kaufman and Carriere have made a three-hour film that is all political incident, sexual titillation, and sentimental gesturing--all beginning, middle, and end.

Well, they do make a few concessions to Kundera's concept and strategy, and that's where they come most to grief. Thus in the middle of their lovemaking, Sabina, the free spirit, tells Tomas, the Don Juan, "You are the complete opposite of kitsch," and it's left at that; whereas in the book the notion of kitsch is omnipresent and ceaselessly assayed. Again, Tereza, a photographer, takes risky snapshots of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and later, in exile, submits these to a Swiss magazine editor, who turns them down as passe. At the same time, he praises shots by a staff photographer of a nudist beach, which, he concedes, are something totally different. "Not at all," says Tereza. "They're the same." "Even I find it difficult to explain what she had in mind," remarks the "I" of the novel, but proceeds to show how the nudist pictures reminded Tereza of her mother who used to run around naked with the shades up, causing her daughter intense embarrassment. That is part of a troubling parallel.

But there is also Tereza's recurring dream of Tomas in a basket suspended above a swimming pool round which he forces Tereza and other naked women to do kneebends while singing. At the merest slip, a woman is shot dead by Tomas's pistol, her body left floating in the pool. This ties in with Tereza's mother not allowing the girl privacy on the toilet by locking the door. In the film, the mother does not figure, and the dream is merely a fantasy in which Tomas gives some naked women suggestive diving lessons. Thus it does not connect with the nudist pictures and those of the enslavement of Czechoslovakia, but becomes pointless, and does not convey the chain of absurdism that encircles and binds the world.

Yet the film fails even in areas where it could easily equal or surpass the book, e.g., in the death from cancer of Tomas and Tereza's beloved dog, Karenin. Because Tereza was reading Tolstoi's novel when they met, Tomas, who claims to see a resemblance, names the pooch he gives Tereza Karenin, even though it is a female. Much later, when the pair live as agricultural laborers in a village, Tomas, no longer allowed to practice human medicine, administers a lethal injection to the suffering Karenin, who, ironically, seems to be smiling. Passages of exquisite melancholy in the novel, serving also to point up the dynamics of Tomas and Tereza's relationship, remain wholly unmoving in the film, partly because of inattention to certain telling details.

Typical of the movie is that it spends much time on the entry of the Russian tanks into Prague, which gives it a chance to display its technical prowess in seamlessly inserting Tereza and Tomas into documentary footage of the invasion. But Kundera scores precisely by downplaying the big historic events, and letting the horror sneak up on us in a sardonic remark here, a grotesque anecdote there. If Kaufman had to make a movie out of Kundera, why not Farewell Party, a much lesser work, but a straightforwardly narrative one with a rattling good story? In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he does not even mention the eponymous trope, which suffuses the entire book, more than twice, the second time in an obvious, heavily underscored ending quite different from Kundera's oblique dying fall.

And, apropos dying, Kundera announces the accidental death of Tomas and Tereza midway through the book, whereas in the film we learn of it only in the penultimate scene--another irony gone. And the particularly emblematic death of Franz, one of Sabina's lovers, which is the subject of a long, characteristic digression that, nevertheless, subtly reinforces the motifs of irony and kitsch, is cut altogether. But, finally, the absence of the authorial "I"--the compere, cicerone, and conscience of the book, the Vergil of this tragicomic Inferno--is what most causes the sinking of the film into what, in an access of benevolence, I shall call mediocrity.

There is a problem with the casting, too. Lena Olin is a splendid Sabina, unself-conscious yet never brazen in her diverse erotic scenes, but her Swedish accent is no more Czech than Juliette Binoche's half-French, half- (by mistake) Polish one, or Daniel Day-Lewis's almost totally British one. Even so, Miss Binoche is exactly right as Tereza, not just endearingly vulnerable, but also conveying the toll vulnerability, innocence, childlike faith can exact from the most confirmed Casanova. Just as Miss Olin is beautiful and slinky, Miss Binoche is pretty and bouncy, and the scene in which the two photograph each other in the nude, along with one where the talented Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski does a government official attempting to brainwash Tomas, are the nearest in spirit to Kundera and, not coincidentally, the best.

As Tomas, Day-Lewis is more than competent but too Anglo-Saxon and young. It is the middle-agedness of Tomas that gives his philandering its philosophical underpinnings (brilliantly set forth in the book and cut from the film), its bittersweet authority, and, when ultimately sacrificed for Tereza, its pathos. The actor's youthfulness puts a different complexion on this promiscuity, deprives it of its comic poignancy. There are also charming performances by two pigs, as the young and grown-up pet porker Mephisto, almost good enough to turn me off pork. But the movie, despite lovingly insinuating cinematography by Sven Nykvist and some stunning Janacek chamber music on the soundtrack, comes rather closer to putting me off art movies by American directors.