Review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) by Kajori A — 15 Jun 2008

I didn't much care for this film: Daniel Day Lewis is fearfully miscast as the lady-killer doctor and speaks with an odd lisp (because they're Czech?) throughout, whereas Juliette Binoche is all tremulous innocence. Lena Olin's Sabina, whose pursuit of "lightness" is a reaction to rigid social strictures and totalitarian "kitsch", is perhaps the most sympathetic of the three characters in the film.

Interestingly, unlike Kundera who remains ambivalent about the lightness-weight dichotomy, Calvino's essay on lightness in his "Six Memos For The Next Millennium" celebrates the virtues of weightlessness: for Calvino, lightness is an important distinguishing mark of post-modern society (he speaks of software and machines that obey the orders of weightless "bits"). Far from being "unbearable", it makes it possible for us to escape what he has described as "the Ineluctable Weight of Living". Perseus needs his winged sandals to cut off the head of Medusa, who turns everything into stone.