The Unbearable Lightness of Being

To return to the blog I needed Daniel Day-Lewis's giant peacock hair and the happiest, saddest scene in all movieland involving a midnight dance hall/hotel and a drunk pig. Bohemians fleeing Switzerland, too, and that never hurts. Soviet tanks I can take or leave.

Philip Kaufman's 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera's fragmentary, impressionistic discourse on choice, responsibility, identity, desire, and death owes none of its quietly, masterfully wild success to the novel, for though the plot, characters, and conflicts of the works roughly mirror each other, more than not their substances and subtleties, from which we form the outlines of their art to fill and continually empty as we experience them, glare and glisten and refract our will in nearly opposite ways: the novel in curious, sensual intelligence that remains, for all its passionate inquiry and action, strangely dispassionate and even vague, as though the affair were merely hypothetical, a thought experiment rather than a living act; the film in slow, sacramental ecstasy that celebrates the nameless, personal joy of place and person--and the greater namelessness and impersonality that extinguishes it. At the heart of the book lies a pleasurable paradox: the very unrepeatability of experience that renders life disconnected and absurd and that in its indifference to desire guarantees both loss and lunacy in the pursuit of pleasure, peace, or conscience, also transforms every choice into an anchor binding us, in all its rootlessness and impossibility, to ourselves and to the world. Because once is never, because every intellectual or physical act exhausts itself and blinks weightlessly into the void of uncreation, each moment, each choice becomes, not despite but because of its futility, a total and spontaneous new creation. It is not time's gravity or certainty that makes life meaningful and sensible but its frailty and chance--its lightness.

At the heart of the movie lies this paradox, and another, more tragic: we are happiest and closest to life when we destroy what we love.

Every thought, word, image, and accident is a mirror we use to build our lives into momentary coherence. When the next second ticks, when coincidence breaks the illusion of cause and effect and the vulnerable nothing spirals out of sense again, we shatter these representations and from their shards assemble other, equally arbitrary mirrors to look at, wonder with, or be lost in. Experience is an allegory in which we read that most basic human desire: not to disappear.

Truly amazing movie. Great acting. Beautiful dog. Drunk pig. 99/100.