The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Philip Kaufman achieves a delicate, erotic balance with his screen version of Milan Kundera’s “unfilmable” novel. Adapted by Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carrière, the film follows a womanizing surgeon (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he struggles with his free-spirited mistress (Lena Olin) and his childlike wife (Juliette Binoche). An intimate epic, The Unbearable Lightness of Being charts the frontiers of relationships with wit, emotion, and devastating honesty.

United States
1988
172 minutes
Color
1.85:1
English
Spine #55

Special Features

Audio commentary by director Philip Kaufman, co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, editor Walter Murch, and actor Lena Olin
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

DVD 1 Disc Out Of Print SRP: $39.95

Special Features

Audio commentary by director Philip Kaufman, co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, editor Walter Murch, and actor Lena Olin
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Cast & Credits

Cast

Daniel Day-Lewis: Tomas
Lena Olin: Sabina
Juliette Binoche: Tereza
Derek de Lint: Franz
Erland Josephson: The ambassador
Pavel Landovsky: Pavel
Donald Moffat: Chief surgeon
Daniel Olbrychski: Interior ministry official
Stellan Skarsgård: The engineer

Credits

Director: Philip Kaufman
Producer: Saul Zaentz
Screenplay: Philip Kaufman
Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on the novel by: Milan Kundera
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Supervising film editor: Walter Murch
Costume design: Ann Roth
Production design: Pierre Guffroy

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Sven Nykvist

Cinematographer

Few cinematographers have been as influential as Ingmar Bergman’s close collaborator Sven Nykvist, who helped create such visual tours de force as The Silence, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander. A painter whose medium was natural light, a capturer of souls, Nykvist made every human portrait an X-ray, and every interior—whether austerely white or lavishly chromatic—an expressive canvas. Nykvist first worked with Bergman in 1953, when he was one of three cinematographers assigned to the director’s gloomy, twilit circus tale Sawdust and Tinsel. But their union truly began with The Virgin Spring—that savage medieval folk tale ushered in the new era of unsparing, gorgeously shot psychological portraits and open-air location photography that would take Bergman from the devastating God’s Silence trilogy to the richly life-affirming Fanny and Alexander. His work with Bergman made Nykvist an in-demand industry figure, and he would go on to shoot movies in Hollywood and beyond, for directors like Bob Rafelson, Bob Fosse, Philip Kaufman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Woody Allen. Nykvist died in 2006.