Cinema: Sex And Death in Czechoslovakia THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

Movies like this used to show up about every third week. Back then, in the 1960s, they were called films, they came from Sweden and Italy and France, and they were taken Very Seriously. They bent the old-fashioned narrative line into a double helix, with sneaky dream sequences and complex flashbacks. You’d come out of an Ingmar Bergman film debating which part was fantasy and which reality, and what did it all really mean? Sexually, European dramas were less fettered than the Hollywood stuff; an art-film lover could get both stimulated and aroused. They were wonderful pictures too, some of them. Movies have never been so daring as when Bergman & Co. were pushing the existential pedal to the cinematic metal. For a while, in the Viet Nam years, Hollywood directors made European-style films, but that was just one more American dabble in radical chic. Soon, with Star Wars and Animal House, Hollywood was again playing to the eternal adolescent.

So The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Phil Kaufman (The Right Stuff), from Czech Author Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel, marks a defiant step backward toward movie maturity. It is about life and death, love and responsibility, private morality and power politics. It rekindles the sparks of adult sexuality on the American screen. And in its capacious reach, the picture means to embrace three decades of European films. For 2 hours 47 minutes, it dances from the skeptical eroticism of mid-’60s Czech films to the leaden sentimentality of French Director Claude Lelouch. At its best, it recalls the anguished intensity of vintage Bergman. At its worst, with its English-speaking actors sporting Middle European accents, it reminds one of De Duva, a parody of Bergman films in which Death (speaking in Borscht Belt Swedish) gets dumped on by a symbolic dove. Sleek and lubricious, elliptical and dead serious, Lightness dares to be laughed at. It surely demands to be admired.

Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis) has an urgent demand, repeated to every woman he meets: “Take off your clothes.” A handsome Prague surgeon, he is also an epic womanizer — a kind of Columbus or Cousteau, eager to chart the provocative depths of womankind. “Is every woman a new land, whose secrets you want to discover?” The questioner is Sabina (Lena Olin), a painter and Tomas’ frequent mistress whose principal props are her mirror and her quaint black bowler. The mirror is Sabina’s canvas, her lover, her critic; the hat is an emblem of her willingness to walk out on a lover or a country when it gets too messy, too close. Like Tomas, she wears a wry smile for life’s ironies — the smile that knows and discounts all. Both need an outsider, in this summer of 1968, to show them what they are missing, and to escort them to the front lines of political melodrama.

Tereza (Juliette Binoche) will do it. She is the village girl who, at first sight and forever, loves Tomas like a fist. She cares for him, trails him, refuses to be cowed by his wandering lust. For Tereza, sex is the rough combustion of animal impulses; love is the deep slumber that follows, the dreams of a child who has curled herself into her parents’ jackknifed form. She has found her vocation in caring for Tomas. And when every Czech’s dreams explode into nightmares — when Russian tanks violate the streets of Prague — Tereza finds her career, snapping artistic photos of the invasion. From there it is a short desperate flight to Switzerland for Tomas and his two women, and a subsequent return to Czechoslovakia for Tereza and Tomas, who surprises himself by paying dearly for principles he was never sure he had.

Kundera’s modernist romance offered Kaufman and Co-Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere one challenge they have smartly ducked. They could have tried to compress the whole story: the characters’ relationships with their parents, the travels of Sabina and her Swiss lover Franz (Derek de Lint), the meditations on Communism and kitsch. Instead, the writers followed Kundera’s advice to them to “eliminate, eliminate.” As Carriere notes, “When you leave some part in a film for viewers to fill in, some can’t or don’t want to. Others do it naturally. We can’t please everybody.” What pleased the adapters was distinguishing a love triangle among the filaments of the novel’s plot. Says Kaufman: “Almost every scene in the book concerns itself, one way or another, with love. Even the invasion is a form of love” — protective, + smothering — “on the part of the Russians.” Producer Saul Zaentz (Amadeus) recalls that “when we asked Milan what he saw as the heart of the book, his exact words were, ‘The love story, of course.’ “

At times Lightness carries Kundera’s plot as a snail carries its house. But the pace is deliberately deliberate; no need for zappy MTV images when a picture looks this ravishing (through Sven Nykvist’s camera) and knows its way. It is only toward the end that Lightness goes off course. Tomas and Tereza head for a friend’s farm; Tomas undergoes an abrupt change of heart; a pet dog falls ill (and takes longer to die than Camille); a farm worker dislocates a shoulder, and everyone treks to a village inn where a pig swigs Pilsener — all of this in an eye blink. Then, in its last breath, the film recovers splendidly, like a rogue making an eloquent deathbed confession. A cunning flashback gives Tomas and Tereza a final reprieve to touch the old ecstasy inside their new happiness.

What Lightness touches is some of the old ecstasy of European movies. It is not just a matter of “Take off your clothes”; it is convincing viewers that sexual behavior is a vital part of life on the movie screen. Kaufman was right to choose as his leads three actors who cart no Hollywood-star baggage with them. They are fresh faces in expressive bodies. Olin, 32, a Swedish actress who starred in Bergman’s After the Rehearsal, reveals a gorgeous muscularity in the scene where Tereza photographs Sabina nude. But all the physical exploitation, and all the tense fun, is in the women’s shifting roles as object and voyeur. Olin is a marvel: her grand, witty gestures have a theatricality that underlines Sabina’s desperate assertion of her independence.

For Tereza’s role, Kaufman interviewed more than 100 actresses — including, he says, three Oscar nominees — before hiring Binoche, 23. In person, the French actress is a dazzler: her smile lights up the block. But in the film, with her fragile, bruised radiance and her eyes shooting heavenward for strength and mercy, Binoche seems as reluctant to display her body as Tereza is. “I find it difficult to be naked in a film,” she says in her lilting accent. “It is the way people look at you with no eyes, as just a body. It is terrifying.” The actress exudes that caged-animal terror, as well as something more subtle. The novel describes Tereza as seeing “her soul shining through the features of her face.” That soul shines — it burns — when / Tereza visits a man’s apartment and stumbles into a rape she has nearly insisted on. Binoche’s face flushes rudely; her hand flutters in defense; she moans in protest or involuntary passion, then finally closes her eyes. It is complex acting worthy of a silent-screen diva.

Day Lewis, 30, earned nifty notices in 1986 as the fop in A Room with a View and as the gay fascist punk in My Beautiful Laundrette. Here he doesn’t get to hit the histrionic high points because Tomas is a cool observer, even of his own seismic shifts. Tomas believes, as Day Lewis notes, that “love is the thing to beware of. And it seems as if Tomas has successfully created a life that will keep love at bay. But he sacrifices his freedom because he makes one decision, to submit to an overwhelming sensation. It is his submission, finally joyful, to the deep need for love.” The viewer’s submission may be the same. Admittedly, not everyone will welcome the overdue return of eroticism and intelligence in a $17 million art film. But doesn’t all the world love what, at heart, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is? A love story, of course.