Milan Kundera's philosophical novel 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' was always going to be difficult to film, a story of lives lived, ordinarily, against a backdrop of politics and eroticism. Philip Kaufamn's attempt is long, has a wonderful score, chooses to have its cast speak English in eastern European accents, showcases Juliet Binoche's beauty, and I think succeeds in avoiding the heaviness, the moral weight, that the story's characters find fundamentally absent from the business of simply being alive from one moment to the next. What it doesn't quite capture is the novel's intellectual playfulness, the authorial wisdom within which the original story was set, which in the book substitutes for the enforced narrative drive of most novels. Whereas some films are best enjoyed by those who haven't seen the source material, this one might work best for those who have: otherwise, some audiences could miss the point. Nonetheless, the ending is strangely affecting and true to the original story; and Daniel Day Lewis surprisingly good as a middle class Czech philanderer.
