It’s one of the novel’s few unexplained paradoxes. Tereza, not Tomas, takes to the floor-and her joy as she bounces around with another man makes Tomas jealous enough to marry her. During Prague Spring, Communist officials glower as a student crowd at a nightclub bops to Buddy Holly.
The key scene (politically and personally) comes before he marries Tereza or dances with her. You could say that Tomas is a non-dancer who does one heartbreaking dance-with his wife-before he dies. The triumph of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is that Kaufman and company choreograph the diverse segments of Kundera’s fiction like a folk dance, a rock musical, and a pastoral ballet. When asked why novelists don’t often make great playwrights, Kurt Vonnegut said, “It’s because they don’t know that theater is dance.” That notion applies triply to the kinetic art of movies. In his novel, Milan Kundera describes his neurosurgeon hero, Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), as an “epic” Don Juan, “prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.” In the movie, Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote and directed, succeeds in making Tomas’ two key relationships-with his waiflike wife Tereza (Juliette Binoche), and an independent artist, Sabina (Lena Olin)-embody that infinite variety. As they drop verbal bombshells about the murderous duplicity of politics and the uglification of the universe, they never lose their ardor or originality. Its lead characters caper through Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia’s 1968 version of the Summer of Love, and then try to withstand the effects of Soviet occupation. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profoundly beguiling movie about sex, love, and rebellion.
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