Philip Kaufman’s film of Milan Kundera’s novel is handsome, adult and, in its best stretches, properly alive, with Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin doing the finest work in it. It is also 171 minutes long, and it loses the book’s voice along the way.
Milan Kundera’s novel is mostly a man thinking aloud: a narrator who interrupts his own lovers to argue about Beethoven and whether anything that happens only once has happened at all. Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carrière have taken the narrator out and kept the people, the beds and the tanks. What is left is a long, handsome, grown-up film about four lovers and one invasion, and it is good without being quite the thing it is adapted from. At 171 minutes it is also too long, and it knows where the slack is and leaves it in.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Tomas, a Prague brain surgeon who tells women to take their clothes off in the voice other men use to ask the time. It is a role that needs a man to be light without trying, and we could see the trying. The accent is a decision he keeps having to remember, and the grin arrives a beat before the line. He is better in the second half, when the film stops asking him to charm and lets him be stubborn, tired and quietly decent; a scene with an official from the Interior Ministry (Daniel Olbrychski) about something he once wrote is the best thing he does.
The women carry it. Juliette Binoche’s Tereza arrives from a spa town with one suitcase and no intention of leaving, and Binoche plays her as someone who has decided to be brave and is frightened by how it feels. Lena Olin’s Sabina, a painter in a bowler hat, is the only person on screen as light as Tomas pretends to be, and Olin gives her a wariness around the eyes that the hat is there to hide. The scene in which Tereza comes to photograph Sabina and Sabina turns the camera round on her is the best in the film: funny, sad and erotic at once, and nobody says what it is about. We laughed, and were surprised at ourselves, because the film had not been funny for some time.
Then the tanks come. Sven Nykvist shoots Prague before the invasion in warm browns and lamplight, flats full of books with a stove in the corner, and for August 1968 the film drops into grainy black-and-white, with Binoche and Day-Lewis cut into the actual newsreel of the day. The editing, by Walter Murch, Vivien Hillgrove and Michael Magill, is so exact that we stopped noticing where the real footage ended. We were horrified, and the thing that did it was small: Tereza keeps taking photographs while a crowd runs the other way, and the camera that was a toy in Sabina’s flat is now the only weapon anyone has. It is the one stretch where the film is plainly better than a book could be.
The rest of the craft is of a piece. Pierre Guffroy’s rooms are lived in down to the ashtrays, and when the story leaves Prague he gives the lovers clean, pale rooms with nothing on the walls, so we feel the loss before anyone mentions it. Ann Roth puts Sabina in black and the hat, Tereza in cardigans a size too big, and Tomas in the same jacket throughout. The music, credited to Mark Adler and leaning hard on Janáček, is piano and strings and almost never swells. It trusts the faces.
What goes missing is the argument. Kundera’s title is a question about whether a life lived lightly weighs anything, and the film reduces it to a line or two and a look. Franz (Derek de Lint), Sabina’s lover in the West, exists so that she has someone to leave, and de Lint is given nothing to play. After the invasion the politics thin out into men in raincoats, and the second half, which we will not describe, is slower than it is sad, with a long rural stretch that could lose twenty minutes and be improved by it. We felt the length.
Kaufman’s previous film, The Right Stuff (1983), was also long and also about men who think they are light, and it moved faster because it had somewhere to be. This one drifts, which is the design, and the design is sometimes an excuse. And yet the final minutes, which depend on a cut and a piece of music and almost nothing else, moved us more than the previous two and three-quarter hours had led us to expect. Watch it in one sitting, late, with the lights off. It is built for that, and it earns its last five minutes even where it has not earned all of its first hundred and sixty-six.
