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Tereza (Juliette Binoche) will do it. She is the village girl who, at first sight and forever, loves Tomas like a fist. She cares for him, trails him, refuses to be cowed by his wandering lust. For Tereza, sex is the rough combustion of animal impulses; love is the deep slumber that follows, the dreams of a child who has curled herself into her parents' jackknifed form. She has found her vocation in caring for Tomas. And when every Czech's dreams explode into nightmares -- when Russian tanks violate the streets of Prague -- Tereza finds her career, snapping artistic photos of the invasion. From there it is a short desperate flight to Switzerland for Tomas and his two women, and a subsequent return to Czechoslovakia for Tereza and Tomas, who surprises himself by paying dearly for principles he was never sure he had.
Kundera's modernist romance offered Kaufman and Co-Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere one challenge they have smartly ducked. They could have tried to compress the whole story: the characters' relationships with their parents, the travels of Sabina and her Swiss lover Franz (Derek de Lint), the meditations on Communism and kitsch. Instead, the writers followed Kundera's advice to them to "eliminate, eliminate." As Carriere notes, "When you leave some part in a film for viewers to fill in, some can't or don't want to. Others do it naturally. We can't please everybody." What pleased the adapters was distinguishing a love triangle among the filaments of the novel's plot. Says Kaufman: "Almost every scene in the book concerns itself, one way or another, with love. Even the invasion is a form of love" -- protective, + smothering -- "on the part of the Russians." Producer Saul Zaentz (Amadeus) recalls that "when we asked Milan what he saw as the heart of the book, his exact words were, 'The love story, of course.' "
At times Lightness carries Kundera's plot as a snail carries its house. But the pace is deliberately deliberate; no need for zappy MTV images when a picture looks this ravishing (through Sven Nykvist's camera) and knows its way. It is only toward the end that Lightness goes off course. Tomas and Tereza head for a friend's farm; Tomas undergoes an abrupt change of heart; a pet dog falls ill (and takes longer to die than Camille); a farm worker dislocates a shoulder, and everyone treks to a village inn where a pig swigs Pilsener -- all of this in an eye blink. Then, in its last breath, the film recovers splendidly, like a rogue making an eloquent deathbed confession. A cunning flashback gives Tomas and Tereza a final reprieve to touch the old ecstasy inside their new happiness.
What Lightness touches is some of the old ecstasy of European movies. It is not just a matter of "Take off your clothes"; it is convincing viewers that sexual behavior is a vital part of life on the movie screen. Kaufman was right to choose as his leads three actors who cart no Hollywood-star baggage with them. They are fresh faces in expressive bodies. Olin, 32, a Swedish actress who starred in Bergman's After the Rehearsal, reveals a gorgeous muscularity in the scene where Tereza photographs Sabina nude. But all the physical exploitation, and all the tense fun, is in the women's shifting roles as object and voyeur. Olin is a marvel: her grand, witty gestures have a theatricality that underlines Sabina's desperate assertion of her independence.