As Daniel Day-Lewis’s brain-surgeon casanova Tomas is pulled between the poles of “Lightness” and “Heaviness” represented by haughty long-term booty-call Sabina (Lena Olin) and ardent wife Tereza (Binoche), so too is the movie: between the genre expectations associated with a film taken from a Serious Novel with Big Ideas and Adult Themes, featuring a cast with auteur-cinema pedigrees, and its own open-ended slyness.[…]
Buoyant and sentimental, fleet and sprawling, witty and finally bitterly sad, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a film infinitely superior to its legacy. When Pauline Kael called it “sophisticated in ways you don’t expect from an American director,” she meant, I think, not that the film is uncommonly ambitious intellectually, or that it goes beyond the usual bounds of American Puritanism with its frequent, emotionally explicit eroticism—but that it does so with such intellectual and sexual playfulness. The black bowler hat that Sabina dons for sex may as well have “MOTIF” chalked on it, but Olin and the film both wear it so insouciantly that the obviousness of the gesture becomes another layer of pleasure.
— Mark Asch (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: Successful surgeon Tomas leaves Prague for an operation, meets a young photographer named Tereza, and brings her back with him. Tereza is surprised to learn that Tomas is already having an affair with the bohemian Sabina, but when the Soviet invasion occurs, all three flee to Switzerland. Sabina begins an affair, Tom continues womanizing, and Tereza, disgusted, returns to Czechoslovakia. Realizing his mistake, Tomas decides to chase after her.