Movies like this used to show up about every third week. Back then, in the 1960s, they were called films, they came from Sweden and Italy and France, and they were taken Very Seriously. They bent the old-fashioned narrative line into a double helix, with sneaky dream sequences and complex flashbacks. You'd come out of an Ingmar Bergman film debating which part was fantasy and which reality, and what did it all really mean? Sexually, European dramas were less fettered than the Hollywood stuff; an art-film lover could get both stimulated and aroused. They were wonderful pictures too, some of them. Movies have never been so daring as when Bergman & Co. were pushing the existential pedal to the cinematic metal. For a while, in the Viet Nam years, Hollywood directors made European-style films, but that was just one more American dabble in radical chic. Soon, with Star Wars and Animal House, Hollywood was again playing to the eternal adolescent.
So The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Phil Kaufman (The Right Stuff), from Czech Author Milan Kundera's 1984 novel, marks a defiant step backward toward movie maturity. It is about life and death, love and responsibility, private morality and power politics. It rekindles the sparks of adult sexuality on the American screen. And in its capacious reach, the picture means to embrace three decades of European films. For 2 hours 47 minutes, it dances from the skeptical eroticism of mid-'60s Czech films to the leaden sentimentality of French Director Claude Lelouch. At its best, it recalls the anguished intensity of vintage Bergman. At its worst, with its English-speaking actors sporting Middle European accents, it reminds one of De Duva, a parody of Bergman films in which Death (speaking in Borscht Belt Swedish) gets dumped on by a symbolic dove. Sleek and lubricious, elliptical and dead serious, Lightness dares to be laughed at. It surely demands to be admired.
Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis) has an urgent demand, repeated to every woman he meets: "Take off your clothes." A handsome Prague surgeon, he is also an epic womanizer -- a kind of Columbus or Cousteau, eager to chart the provocative depths of womankind. "Is every woman a new land, whose secrets you want to discover?" The questioner is Sabina (Lena Olin), a painter and Tomas' frequent mistress whose principal props are her mirror and her quaint black bowler. The mirror is Sabina's canvas, her lover, her critic; the hat is an emblem of her willingness to walk out on a lover or a country when it gets too messy, too close. Like Tomas, she wears a wry smile for life's ironies -- the smile that knows and discounts all. Both need an outsider, in this summer of 1968, to show them what they are missing, and to escort them to the front lines of political melodrama.