I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Thanks for the memories!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I can't tell you how many movies I've seen in which the principal characters wind up in bed together at the drop of a hat after just meeting each other. Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) by far had the most direct and uniquely creative approach - he asked women he was interested in to take off their clothes. And they did! Just like that. It's not a technique I've ever tried but I have my doubts that it's as simple as that. Maybe for Harvey Weinstein but look where it got him. The 'lightness' of the title was referenced a number of times in the picture and it referred to the way Tomas approached life and relationships with the opposite sex. To him, there was a 'lightness' that permeated his actions and thinking, never carrying things out to their ultimate conclusion. Whereas Tereza (Juliette Binoche) represented just the opposite, one might say the 'heavy' approach to dealing with potential romantic partners. That is, it had to mean something, and her recognition of Tomas's infidelity caused her much psychic harm - "But how can someone love without being in love?" This may be the age old question in the male/female dynamic, explored in this film as the married couple attempt to reconcile their relationship while in the midst of a corresponding affair with Tomas's worldly mistress Sabina (Lena Olin).Set against the backdrop of the Prague Spring of 1968, the political element didn't seem to be entirely necessary in the telling of the relationship story. However it did provide a measure of conflict for Tomas who was called upon to retract an earlier published piece taking the Soviet Communist regime to task for the way it dehumanized people and placed them under the thumb of an overreaching government. Notwithstanding the title of the picture, the film's resolution is anything but light in the sense that it spelled doom for the principal characters. It's perhaps the story's dramatic irony that Tomas and Tereza finally found their true happiness outside the confines of the city where they could be as free as possible to pursue life on their own terms, if only for a short while.

By all accounts - many of them here, on IMDb - this went down well on its initial release possibly because of the similar blend of politics and great loves to that we had already seen in Dr. Zhivago, another movie in which Russia was the third angle of the eternal triangle. Like Zhivago this was also based on a well-known novel albeit one I haven't read so I can comment only on the film. This may be only the second film featuring Daniel Day Lewis that I have actually seen albeit he appears to flavour of every alternate month and the delight of the Academic-Pseud axis. I found no evidence of why this should be so in There Will Be Blood and nor do I here. I see an actor who is competent, knows how to hit his marks and deliver dialogue but anything more than this eludes me. Juliette Binoche is, as usual with her, outstanding, and Lena Olin manages to hold her own. Apart from that ...

Aka My Left Testicle , aka The Unbearable Pretentiousness of a Dreadful Film.Absolutely awful . Dreadful script , comically bad acting , especially from the perpetually smug Daniel Day Lewis and his terrible mid European accent.It does though warrant 2 stars for the acres of bare flesh displayed by the equally gorgeous Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche.So don't waste 150 minutes of your life , search the net and find the 15 minutes or so of Olin and Binoche at their beautiful best. Don't waste your time on the other 135 minutes.

Director Philip Kaufman's ambitious screen adaptation of Milan Kundera's elaborate lover's triangle is, despite its cumbersome literary title, intelligent pop entertainment: an intimate epic of sexual freedom set against a vivid backdrop of political repression in Czechoslovakia during and after Prague Spring.The complexity of the tripartite relationship between incurably promiscuous man of medicine Daniel Day-Lewis and two contrasting women (mistress Lena Olin and naïve but knowing wife Juliette Binoche) more than compensates for the occasional broad-as-a-barn-door strokes of pathos and humor (step forward, Mephisto the pet pig). Both women are natural extensions of their mutual lover's divided attitude toward the other sex, with photojournalist Binoche regarding life through the honest, unblinking eye of a camera, while the more uninhibited Olin reflects her experience through the deceptive imagery of art (using mirrors as her medium).The eroticism is fairly explicit, but Kaufman's interpretation (with old pro Jean-Claude Carrière) of what could have been a difficult literary exercise (by Hollywood movie-making standards) is both thoughtful and provocative, even if the director's commercial instincts are sometimes at odds with the highbrow material, for example during the final return-to-the-soil farm idyll. The highlight of the film is the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, brilliantly recreated using actual documentary footage, seamlessly integrated with dramatic inserts into one of the more exciting passages seen on the big screen in quite a while.