Product: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Two-Disc Special Edition) (2006)
Rating: 2.0
WAR AND PIECES
Daniel Day Lewis as a Prague doctor, hoping for a little afternoon pleasure while on a medical trip, hits upon and scores with Juliette Binoche, but drives off, rudely, in his sports car, when his afternoon delight reveals she lives with her mother. End of story, until she shows up at his door in Prague to continue the conversation. Great opening, but soon I couldn't help but wonder why these two oddball Berlin Wall era ambiguous revolutionaries are so madly in love with each other. We are told that repeatedly, and a marriage union locks the deal, but they seem about as chemically inclined towards one another as a bland peanut butter and jelly sandwich; there for the sake of being. But they are, apparently, the Scarlet and Rhett of the fall of The Soviet Empire, helplessly involved in a Cold War deadlock with Russians who are revealed as typically sitting at a long table in a bar, kicking back vodkas, and behaving like Boris and Natasha from The Bullwinkle cartoons. Come on, really? Lena Olin's nude exhibition with a tophat was a pretentious symbol of democratic freedom, and the potboiler romance and revolution is forever on a low simmer, when it needs to be boiling over. If the film would have stopped when Juliette Binoche shows up unexpectedly at Daniel Day Lewis's door, and they made wild rebellious graphic sex defying all conventions for the duration of the film, (no top hats please, that is SO Al Pacino 'Cruising'), this cold war wouldn't have been so frigid.