Film and Text
"The Unbearable Lightness of Life" is the culmination of Milan Kundera's thought. Successfully managed the two sensitive propositions of politics and love. The story of Prague and Geneva in that turbulent 1968 is described in a heavy and profound tone. Because this article is a film essay, I won't go into details about the original.
To be honest, it is not easy to adapt a text work with profound philosophical connotations into a movie. There is a prohibition: movies can never be philosophical. The two expressions of film and text in the art world seem to be irreconcilable in The Unbearable Lightness of Life. Before watching the movie, I was also worried that I lost Kundera's precise and penetrating textual explanations like a scalpel, and the only thing left is whether the expression of the image is not an anti-dog, and it has become an erotic film that only exposes gimmicks. ? All of this depends on the director's grasp of the camera and the atmosphere and the choice of the original plot. After reading it, I can only say that it was not satisfactory, perhaps because I had too high expectations.
In terms of plot, the movie made a lot of cuts to the story of Sabina and Franz, focusing on the entanglement between Thomas and Teresa, making Sabina a supporting role, and Franz being optional. University professor. Their existence becomes a foil for the love of the other two. The director relies on the dialogue and music to shape the philosophical atmosphere of the film, rather than relying on the lens and the scenery, which avoids the narrow audience but also becomes a flaw in the film. People who like the original may not be very happy. I think the director deliberately makes the audience feel like they want to say something and then stop talking, and use this kind of inexplicable taste to compensate for the philosophical thought that is difficult to express.
The two propositions of politics and love in the original work can be said to be equally divided, but the film clearly emphasizes love over politics, and the Prague Spring has become the catalyst for their love. For example, the original text explains in great detail what Thomas wrote about Oedipus:
"But he thought to himself, whether they knew it or not, it was not the main question; the main question was whether it was because one did not Knowing him is innocent? Could it be that the person sitting on the throne is completely irresponsible to his subjects because he is a fool?"
"Thomas when he heard the followers of the authorities defend their purity of heart, he thought, because of your 'don't know', this country has lost its freedom, maybe for hundreds of years, and you can still shout and not feel Guilt? Can you face up to what you've done? Why don't you feel fear? Do you have eyes to see? If so, you should stab them out and wander away from Thebes!"
——Original The fifth chapter of the book, Light and Heavy
, turned into a very brief pub dialogue in the original book, and also added a bridge between Russians and Czechs arguing about pub music. The director deliberately weakened the political atmosphere, and tried to limit the "kitsch" against communism shown in the original work to the level of the conflict between two value orientations.
As one of the focuses of the book, the theory of eternal calamity was selectively ignored by the director. This is also my dissatisfaction. Thomas once thought about it:
a few days later, he was moved by another thought, I Write it down here as a supplement to the previous section: there is a planet somewhere beyond space where all human beings can regenerate and have full knowledge of their life and experience on earth perception.
Perhaps there is another planet where we will be reborn a third time with the experience of the first two lives.
There may be many more planets where humans will be born at a more mature level (one level is one life).
This is Thomas' version of the return to perpetual catastrophe.
——The fifth chapter of the original book is light and heavy
The original book relies on the exposition of the point of view of the return of eternal calamity, combined with the characters' experiences and choices to express the most important part of life. The film may simply give up this content due to the constraints of the expression technique or the length of time. Makes the characters in the film more than light and heavy enough. That's why many people who haven't read the original have seen the movie and thought it was nothing more than an erotic tale of two flirtatious couples.
Of course, as a film adaptation, it is still a success, and it interprets the light and heavy of the original from the perspective of love. If judged purely by the standard of a movie, it is undoubtedly a soul-stirring literary romance.
Binary Opposition
The original book opens with the philosophical proposition of the eternal return:
"If every second of our life is repeated countless times, we will be like Jesus crucified, nailed to eternity. The prospect is terrible. In the world of eternal return, the unbearable burden of responsibilities weighs heavily on our every action, which is why Nietzsche said that the concept of eternal return is the heaviest burden.”
——The first chapter of the original book Light and heavy
This is Kundera's extreme weight, which means a kind of heaviness that goes back and forth and never stops called eternity. Immediately asked, is the so-called "light" easy? Parmenides is also quoted:
"Parmenides asked precisely this question in the sixth century BC. She saw the world divided into two opposite halves: light, dark; graceful, vulgar; warm, cold; being , non-existence. He calls half of them positive (bright; graceful, warm, present), and the other half is naturally negative. We can see that this distinction between positive and negative poles is naive and simple, and at least one thing is hard to pin down: Which side is positive? Heavy? Or light?"
——The first chapter of the original book Light and Heavy
Parmenides replied: Light is positive, heavy is negative. This is a clear binary opposition. But Kundera doesn't think so. He thinks this is a question. The opposition between light and heavy is the most mysterious and the most ambiguous. The subsequent stories revolved around a series of binary oppositions of love and desire, spirit and flesh, lightness and heaviness. Throughout the book, it can be found that Kundera strives to show the delicate relationship between these seemingly diametrically opposed two. Thomas, Teresa, Sabina, Franz are each a complex of contradictions, both light and heavy in them; their love has both platonic spiritual love and pure physical attraction; When dealing with the events of the Prague Spring, they have a deep sense of social responsibility and a yearning to escape from a political and comfortable life.
It can be seen that the traditional binary opposition constitutes an intriguing paradox in Kundera's book. The traditional binary opposition is the relationship between subject and object, good and evil, beauty and ugliness and other incompatible concepts. The Danish physicist Bohr said: "The opposite of small truths is of course falsehood, but the opposite of great truths is still great truths." This strong contrast corresponds to the wobbly choices of the characters in the play: Trey Sha travels back and forth between Geneva and Prague, choosing between light and heavy lifestyles; Thomas Swing and Sabina and Teresa, choosing between spiritual and fleshly love. Kundera directly places the characters in a sharply contradictory context with no room for manoeuvre. Unlike other works, such as "Thunderstorm", which uses the only binary opposition as the climax of the whole book, "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" runs through the whole book, and the two sides exist because of the existence of the other.
When it comes to binary opposition, we must mention Camus. Camus's creations also have a large number of binary opposition themes, absurd and rational, life and death, depravity and salvation, sunshine and shadow, guilt and innocence. These binary opposition themes often Coming in pairs, and not canceling each other, even has the opposite meaning, this is one of his major characteristics and charms, Camus used this rhetoric several times in his essays: using darkness to describe bright sunshine . There is no logical coherence to be seen in this rhetoric, and contradictions are implied everywhere. The two poles of binary opposition exist for each other's existence, forming a strong tension, where paradox, ambiguity and polysemy arise.
But Camus's binary opposition is only a background contradiction, and his characters don't need to make painful choices, often finding a third way out of the two. Camus' paradox is an existential paradox, while Kundera is more rational and more inclined towards realism. He boldly asked the characters in the play to think about ideological issues, and he did not shy away from putting the eternal problem of the body and spirit in love before Thomas. From the comparison of these two ideological writers, we can see how strong the vitality of the eternal proposition of binary opposition is. . . .
In another proposition - "Politics", the binary opposition has been diluted, and the issue of ideology and human nature censorship is no longer represented as in the original work. Just the opposition of Russian and Czech aesthetic tastes (the tavern scene); Swiss (editor) and Czech (Teresa) values. When Thomas returned to Prague, he was censored for articles he had written about Oedipus. The film's handling of this point is too hasty. It fails to clarify the connection between Oedipus and the current situation, and it does not portray the contradiction in which Thomas hesitates between signing and not signing. Thomas became an independent thinker, recklessly and resolutely refusing a request from a Home Office official for him to sign a statement. It looks more like the members of the underground party are protecting the organization, which is the biggest failure of the film. There is no contradiction, no binary opposition, no thought-provoking dialogue, and the bland narrative transitions to a fragment of the two who lost their jobs and went to live in the countryside. You know, there is such a sentence in the preface of the whole book:
"All sins have been forgiven in advance, and everything is despicably permitted!"
——The preface of "The Unbearable Lightness of Life"
refers to exactly what this sentence refers to. The fact that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother because of his ignorance was also an insinuation of the Czech regime's irresponsible act to justify the fall of the country due to previous ignorance! And the film ignores this connotation so much, relying only on Thomas' high talk in the tavern and the refusal of a statement to narrate, making this plot appear independent of the spirit of the whole film.
In addition, the film's performance of the mutual conversion of the binary opposition and contradiction is still very good. Thomas initially intends to maintain a "sexual friendship" and maintain a "light" lifestyle, but gets caught up in the "spirit and flesh" entanglement with Teresa and Sabine, when Teresa asks him how he could be without love When there is a question like sex, he, who is good at words, has no way to answer it. Thomas places himself in a kind of "heavy" that comes from the pursuit of "lightness".
After the Prague Spring, Thomas and Theresa wanted to escape the political turmoil in the Czech Republic and came to Geneva to choose a "light" lifestyle. But Teresa finds her life lost, and her previous love affair with Thomas is no longer heavy enough to tether her to Geneva. So she resolutely left and returned to the "heavy" way of life.
An intellectual, Thomas had a deep hatred of invaders and totalitarian rule, and refused to retract an essay on Oedipus out of a distaste for "political kitsch" and refused to issue a statement pledging allegiance to the authorities Signed, lost his medical career, and became a window cleaner. Thomas chose a life of heaviness because the kind of lighthearted living like an angel in kitsch paradise is beyond the reach of a self-conscious being. He finally found joy in a very hard life, "Mission? I don't have a mission. No one has a mission. It's a great relief when you find yourself free and you don't have any mission." And the same Out of disgust for "political kitsch", he refused to sign the ten thousand people's protest, giving up the heavy and choosing the light. When he learned that the protesters who signed were persecuted by the totalitarian regime, he felt guilty because he escaped the persecution by not signing, and his heart returned to a heavy situation.
Image representation of lightness and heaviness
Let’s taste how the director uses images to express the ultimate proposition of lightness and heaviness.
First of all, the processing of Teresa's three swimming pool clips in the film is extremely successful, which can be called the highlight of the whole film. Teresa grabs Thomas' attention when she jumps into the pool for the first time and sets the tone for the shot and the lighting. The second time was a successful attempt by the director. This passage in the original book is Teresa's dream. Let's take a look at how it is described in the original book:
she walked around the swimming pool naked with a large group of naked women, and Thomas, hanging in a basket on the dome, shouted at them, Ask them to sing and kneel. As long as someone didn't kneel well, he shot her.
The film shows Teresa floating in the pool, using her eyes to move up and down the horizon to switch scenes to connect dreams and reality. The light is refracted by the water, the woman's body is looming and hidden by the water, and Thomas' figure is fleeting. The lens without dialogue successfully gives the audience a dizzy feeling to replace the philosophical description in the original work. Since there was no foreshadowing of Teresa's life experience before, it is difficult for the audience to think of the meaning of this scene if they have not read the original book. However, the director's subtle technique can cover up this abruptness. Of course, due to ethical and film grading considerations, there is no shooting scene. Otherwise, becoming a CULT film will inevitably affect the quality and box office of the entire film.
At the beginning of the film, Teresa subconsciously grabbed Thomas' hand in a light sleep and prevented him from leaving. Thomas then hands her a copy of "Anna Karenina" and leaves after kissing her finger. Here it reflects the weight of men and the lightness of women.
Sabina's top hat is an impressive prop for the film. The director successfully expressed the emotion contained in the hat. Sabina's entangled relationship with two men, the hat is the best interpretation. Every time the director does not forget to give the top hat a close-up. This masculine black hat has these meanings:
First, it's a vague memory of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of the small town of Bohemian in the nineteenth century.
Second, it's a memorial to her father. Burying her father's hostage and becoming a brother Zhangu took all her parents' property, she refused to disregard her shame to defend her rights, and sarcastically declared that she was willing to have this top hat as a difficult inheritance.
Third, it's a prop in her multiple sex games with Thomas.
Fourth, it is a sign of the ingenuity she deliberately cultivated. She didn't bring many things with her when she moved, and bringing this stupid and impractical thing meant that she gave up other more useful things.
Fifth, she still carried it when she was abroad, and the hat became a sentimental object. She was wearing this hat when she went to see Thomas in Zurich, and was wearing it on her head when she opened the hotel door. But something happened that she didn't expect: the hat was no longer interesting and sexually stimulating, but a monument to a bygone time. This meeting is a response to time, a hymn to their shared history, and a sad summary of the unsentimental past that is far gone and cannot be returned.
The top hat is a motive in Sabina's music for life, reappearing again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all meanings are lost from the hat like water through a riverbed. We might be able to call it the Heraclitus riverbed ("you cannot enter the same river twice"): the hat is a riverbed, and every time Sabina walks, she sees another river, a semantic river: Each time, the same thing takes on a new meaning, even though the original meaning resonates with it, mingling with the new meaning. Each new experience resonates, adding an echoing harmony. Thomas and Sabina were moved by the appearance of the hat in their hotel in Zurich and had sex almost in tears, the reason being that the black genie was not just a relic of their sex game, but a memento that made They thought of Sabina's father, and her grandfather, who lived without planes and cars. Now, from this angle, perhaps we can better understand the abyss between Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to her story, and she eagerly listened to his story. But although they both understood the logical meaning of each other's words, they couldn't hear the whispers of the semantic river flowing through them. So Franz felt uncomfortable when she appeared in front of him wearing this top hat, as if someone was speaking to him in a language he didn't understand; neither obscene nor sentimental, just an incomprehensible gesture. He was uncomfortable because he didn't understand.
The ending first explains the ending of the two and then narrates it, which is undoubtedly in line with the original narrative. Halfway through the original book, Sabina received bad news. The director let the audience watch Thomas and Teresa drive on a road with known results in the last few minutes, like a road that never ends, like the ultimate question of light and heavy, which can never be answered, this ending Processing was successful.
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