The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

Sorry, this movie sucks

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Great movie in top 10 favorites of all time. Being Czech emigrant have experienced what it was like being there in 60's. So from that point the movie was really genuine. I have read the book as well and don't agree with comments that the book was overwhelmingly better than the movie. The director has done a great job. And there is a real chemistry between Daniel Day Lewis Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche so sexual scenes are really HOT. The acting of all of 3 is of the highest standards i have seen in a movie. Of course the movie cant ever been made as a book. But all scenes are carefully chosen and powerfully crafted so i felt the same energy as when reading a book. Mind you that happened only with this movie and Doktor Zhivago starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. Maybe i found the story so powerful as i had to leave my country and can relate to the story line. 10 out of 10

According to a number of reviews that I've read (here on IMDb) - This 1988 movie was, apparently, an absolute corruption of the novel, which was written by Czech-writer, Milan Kundera, in 1984.Perhaps this was so (I haven't read Kundera's book) - But I will tell you one thing that's totally true - At a 3-hour running time, "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" was, indeed, totally unbearable to tolerate.Regardless of containing some deliberately distracting, soft-core erotica, thrown into the story for good measure, the love-triangle that transpired between Tomas, Tereza and Sabina was such a tiresome, little, cry-baby affair that any gratuitous sexuality wedged into the action only served to render the rest of the story as being nothing but a blasted bore.Set in Prague in the year 1968 - Believe me, this film was very-very dry storytelling.And, I think that that dullard, actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, was totally miscast as the fickle, conceited, playboy doctor who seemed to spend a good part of his waking hours dutifully jumping in and out of bed with one babe after another.

Takes place in 1968. Something about a Czech man named Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) who (somehow) has a VERY active sex life with numerous women. Then some revolution occurs...or something. Frankly I was so utterly bored I could have cared less.I caught this up a theatre with a friend in 1988 (she's female, I'm male). Neither one us read the book and had no idea what the movie was about. We just knew it had gotten raves from critics. Both of us are intelligent with college degrees and have no problem with a talky movie. Well this movie was virtually all talk. Sadly none of it was interesting! For starters it was badly cast. It was almost funny to see all these women eagerly undressing and jumping into bed with Tomas. Day-Lewis is (to be blunt) ugly here and gives a dull and lifeless performance. The women in his life are given next to no personality of depth. They're just there to be used. The story droned on and on and on and ON! My mind kept wandering while trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Towards the last hour or so I was fighting to stay awake. My friend agreed. We walked out of the movie tearing it to ribbons pointing out the lousy acting and incomprehensible story line. I tried watching it again recently and gave up after 45 minutes. Again--the acting sucked and the story went NOwhere! Skip this one. Even Day-Lewis didn't like it.

Director Philip Kaufman's ambitious screen adaptation of Milan Kundera's elaborate lover's triangle is, despite its cumbersome literary title, intelligent pop entertainment: an intimate epic of sexual freedom set against a vivid backdrop of political repression in Czechoslovakia during and after Prague Spring.The complexity of the tripartite relationship between incurably promiscuous man of medicine Daniel Day-Lewis and two contrasting women (mistress Lena Olin and naïve but knowing wife Juliette Binoche) more than compensates for the occasional broad-as-a-barn-door strokes of pathos and humor (step forward, Mephisto the pet pig). Both women are natural extensions of their mutual lover's divided attitude toward the other sex, with photojournalist Binoche regarding life through the honest, unblinking eye of a camera, while the more uninhibited Olin reflects her experience through the deceptive imagery of art (using mirrors as her medium).The eroticism is fairly explicit, but Kaufman's interpretation (with old pro Jean-Claude Carrière) of what could have been a difficult literary exercise (by Hollywood movie-making standards) is both thoughtful and provocative, even if the director's commercial instincts are sometimes at odds with the highbrow material, for example during the final return-to-the-soil farm idyll. The highlight of the film is the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, brilliantly recreated using actual documentary footage, seamlessly integrated with dramatic inserts into one of the more exciting passages seen on the big screen in quite a while.