FREE ESSAY ON THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: A COMPARISON OF THE NOVEL AND THE MOVIE.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: A COMPARISON OF THE NOVEL AND THE MOVIE.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Comparison of the Novel and the Movie.
The Novel and the movie differ in how they emphasize events that occur.
Things that hold great value in the novel don't have much importance in the movie and
vice versa. Milan Kundera wrote the novel, which was first published in 1984. The movie
was the work of Philip Kaufman, the director, and Saul Zaentz, the producer. Together
they did a very respectable job in representing the novel.
The novel focused on three relationships that tell an interlocking story. The
relationships are Tereza and Tomas, Tomas and Sabina, as well as Sabina and Franz. The
main focus is Tomas. He is a man torn between his love for Tereza, his wife, and his
repeated "erotic adventures", particularly his long time affair with the internationally
noted artist Sabina. In the novel, irrevocable choices and events that test the limits of
human fortitude shape the characters lives. Because life is as it is, the world in which
we live and the world in which the characters live is one in which, because things can
only occur once and then disappear in the past, existence seems to lose substance and
weight. Thus drawing the title into play. In coping with the consequences of both their
actions and desires, as well as the intruding demands of society and the state. The
characters struggle to create lives that have individual value and lasting meaning. 
At the beginning of the novel Kundrea asks, "what then shall we choose? Weigh or
lightness?" The novel itself is his attempt to answer that question. The answer is hinted
at in the final scene of the novel. Where Tomas and Tereza find themselves in the small
country hotel after their evening of dancing, which was a rare event for them. When Tomas
turns on the lamp in their room "a large nocturnal butterfly" rises from the lamp and
circles the room in which they are alone. Thus the room contains only the two of them,
their happiness and their sadness. Sabina also adds another portion to the answer.
"Sabina felt emptiness all around here. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her
betrayals?" "Naturally she had not realized it until now. How could she have? The goals
we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows
nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that
gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of
the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being...was
that the goal?" Kundrea wrote this on page 122. It reveals something of what the
unbearable lightness of being is, perhaps a weigh more than any sort of lightness.
In the movie Tomas is the one providing answers to us in regards to the question of
lightness and weight. His decision to give up liberty for love. He begins the movie as a
highly respected brain surgeon, with a freewheeling lifestyle. At the beginning of the
movie he tells a young nurse. "Take off your clothes" which she does. He uses his job as
a doctor as a way to "get his foot in the door" when it comes to women. After all don't
you trust your physician when he or she asks you to remove your clothes for an
examination? 
Tomas is called to a small spa town to perform an operation, there he meets Tereza. She
has Anna Karenina tucked under her arm. Attracted to her by her naivete, Tomas falls in
love with her, marries her, and then is forever torn between his womanizing and his wife.
He continues his affair with Sabina in Prague, she is a kindred spirit who meanwhile
develops a sexually ambiguous relationship with Tereza. It becomes a tangled emotional
landscape with messy beds and broken hearts. It is viewed through a carefully selected
group of choreographed, comic, kinky and even elegant nude scenes.
Sabina is generous in bed and on canvas, and artist who paints with mirrors, that are
refractions of life. And Tereza is a photographer, trapping images with her camera. When
the Soviets take over Prague. Her photos are scenes of resistance and bloodshed. Hoping
to smuggle the photos out tot he west her photos are captured by the KGB. Who use the
photos to identify resisters. Along with other sympathizers she is arrested and
interrogated. "Don't you know we love you?" she is asked by a soviet. This is an echo of
her feelings towards Tomas. She is released and all three, her Tomas and Sabina, end up
in Geneva. Where each makes a crucial emotional choice. Tereza to leave Geneva, because
she feels that her husband does not love her, Tomas to follow her back to Czechoslovakia,
and Sabina to leave her lover Franz. Who she once told Tomas ".... He's the best man I've
ever known. He's bright, handsome, and he's crazy about me. And, he's married...." 
The movie and the novel both have their strong similarities to each other, but there are
also major differences between the works due to their different mediums of expression.
The novel uses the written word, while the movie uses stage, screen and sound to express
itself. In terms of expression the stage, screen and sound will always win. You can see
the events as they "actually seemed to" happen. You can more freely and easily associate
yourself and your feelings for a character in a story when that story is told in film.
The downside to film however is that is cannot contain, nor hope to represent all the
symbols that the author of the novel used to express himself. And something is lost in
the transition from the written novel to the big screen. After all how does one emphasize
the ideas of the goals we pursue and what the composition of life is on the screen when
we are focusing more of our attention to the plot of things rather than the subtleties of
the language used. This is the advantage that the novel enjoys the subtle things of the
work. For instance, when I read the book I came across a line, I do not recall being in
the movie. It is on page 88, where the narrator says in the book "If I were to make a
record of all of Sabina and Franz's conversations, I could compile a long list of their
misunderstandings. Let us be content, instead, with a short dictionary." The meaning in
that line leaps out at you. Sabina, who called Franz "The best man I've ever known" has
had a great deal of misunderstandings about each other. They do not share a kindred
spirit as her and Tomas do. The second part of the quote "Let us be content, instead,
with a small dictionary." Refers the reader back to the beginning of the relationship and
the purity it had initially for Sabina. In the book she wishes to live life lightly. She
has cut away all ties to any burden that might limit her freedom. For it is that access
to freedom that allows her to float above life. Never allowing herself to be dirtied by
it.
This type of behavior on her part is central to the story, during the middle part of it.
Yet the movie does not pay it a great deal of attention. The movie focuses on the
conflicts going on in Tomas, rather than in Sabina. The main idea is lost somewhat in the
films focus on Tomas, who only adequately manages to express the unbearable lightness of
being. In the end of the film we see Tomas become weighed down somewhat and we find out
only at the very end what happens to Sabina. She has gone to the United States.
The one way of creating lightness or the weight with the ground in life that the stories
places emphasis is by entering a lifestyle that contains certainty, predictability or
stability. This main idea is more easily represented in a novel than on screen. So in the
end the written word is a better medium that the medium of stage and screen.