Powerful

Fantastic!

best movie i've ever seen.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An adaptation of the novel of the same name by Milan Kundera, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is A Masterpiece of a film. Its difficult, saddening, challenging, but ultimately, affecting. The Top-Notch Performances only add more to the narrative.'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' Synopsis: In 1968, a Czech doctor with an active sex life meets a woman who wants monogamy, and then the Soviet invasion further disrupts their lives.Writer Jean-Claude Carrière portrays the effect on Czechoslovak artistic and intellectual life during the 1968 Prague Spring of socialist liberalization preceding invasion by Soviet led Warsaw Pact and subsequent coup that ushered in hard-line communism. Its an extremely disturbing story, that has layers of some great sexual power, beneath all the sadness. The characters are complex, but expressive. And their journey bristles with anger in those rousing 171-minutes, while this story unfolds.Philip Kaufman's Direction is excellently done. He deserves credit for churning out a film that turns out to be much more than just a dramatic exploration of its characters. Cinematography is proper. Editing is decent. Art & Costume Design are flawless.Performance-Wise: Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche & Lena Olin deliver superior performances. Day-Lewis is in very good form, measuring his performance perfectly between sexual temptation & of being a victim of his surroundings. Olin is a marvel, stealing some of the film's best scenes with her seductiveness. Binoche is quietly devastating in her portrayal, matching up to Day-Lewis & Olin at all times. On the whole, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is A Must Watch.

In 1968, a Czech doctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) with an active sex life meets a woman who wants monogamy, and then the Soviet invasion further disrupts their lives.As someone who loves Milan Kundera, and considers him the greatest living novelist (as of 2015), this is a strange adaptation. While it has been several years since I read "Unbearable Lightness", I do not recall the preoccupation with sexuality. The Czech-Russian interaction is heavier in my mind. Of course, this could just be my memory and the aspects that stood out for me.In a note to the Czech edition of the book, Kundera himself remarks that the movie had very little to do with the spirit either of the novel or the characters in it. And that seems right to me, as the film completely removes the philosophy and reflections on Nietzsche. Jean-Claude Carrière and Philip Kaufman were nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, which is interesting: should adaptations be literal or merely inspirational?

Although the screenplay is based on the great and world-famous book by Milan Kundera, it was written by others (Jean-Claude Carrière and the director Philip Kaufman) and thus lost its original touch and approach - as was pointed out by Kundera himself who withdrew from the outcome. On the other hand, fragile feelings, ponderings and internal doubts are very difficult to express on the screen - without losing the pace and uniformity of the plot. It is also pity that Prague was not / could not been used, as it is a beautiful city and gives more realism than the French places used. Depicion of the socialist/communist oppression is, however, rather perfunctory, seeming not so serious as it really was in the 1970ies within the Warsaw block when hopes of intellectuals for the so-called human-faced socialism vanished as liberal steps were diminished or repealed.The cast is, of course, brilliant, in particular the bohemian ménage à trois members: Daniel Day-Lewis as Tomas, Juliette Binoche as Tereza and Lena Olin as Sabina - all later multiple Academy Award winners and/or nominees, and from different European countries (the movie itself is still the US one). They and some other fine European actors have provided the movie a real European atmosphere, without a Hollywood studio feeling as sometimes perceived in "older" movies.Nevertheless, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is still a movie high above average, enhancing historical facts as well. But it is hard to say whether is is recommendable to read the book before or after...

I watched this movie on Korean TV, when I was about 16. It was dubbed into Korean, and I did not bother to try to understand it (English is my native language); actually I didn't even pay full attention to the video images, other than the sex scenes. Basically, it seemed to be about this (French?) poet-philosopher guy (Daniel Day Lewis), kinda crazy, who just goes around having sex with women. The sex scenes seemed pretty intense, with loud moans and shrieks by the women. The rest of the movie seemed boring with quaint European landscapes and historical cityscapes, the beauty of which a teenage boy shouldn't be expected to appreciate. Juliette Binoche was the guy's beautiful girlfriend or wife, who was always hurt by his womanizing but didn't divorce or break up with him (or did she in the end? I don't remember). I did not really understand the deep philosophy or message of the movie, if it had one.