Kundera's thoughts?

I was wondering the same thing. The movie was released maybe four years after the novel, right? I wonder how much he was consulted in the writing of the script and what his overall opinion of the film was. Do you think they'll make movie versions of any other of his novels? I'd like to see the Book of Laughter and Forgetting made into a film by a trusted director.



Oh the unbearable wetness of peeing.

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I have it from a very good source that Kundera was so outraged, by the non-validity of this film, that he cried all the way to the bank (which he visited just before proceeding on to a 15-hour "lunch" with Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche.)

Hi, I read some interview with Kundera (for Czech newspapers) couple of years ago. Kundera is hiding from the world and gives interviews about once in ten years, but in this one he said that he was so far only happy with the movie adaption of his novel called The Joke (ZERT), which was made in 1968 - 69 by a Czech director Jires. This movie never made it abroad as the regime changed just that year. This movie is brilliant - as many Czech movies from the 60's. R.

I remember reading that Kundera disliked Kaufman's movie, and liked the film version of "The Joke". The reason for this was that "Unbearable" is in large parts unfilmable, whereas "The Joke" is a more straigthforward story and easier to make into a movie. "The Joke" is a more faithful adaptation.

I remember Kundera saying somewhere that he likes to write in a way that his books cannot easily be turned into films, and I think this has been the case at least since "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". He wants to utilize the specific strenghts of literature, and concentrate less on "filmic" elements like plot.

Kundera has declared himself that he detests pre-given answers by avoiding to give a concrete psysical description of his characters. Moreover, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is a really deep philosophical book, very dense, the story is not linear and according to me not really interesting as a plot. This does not mean that I reproach the book which remains one of my favorites (I have read it in 3 languages and always find something new therein). It means rather that the director didn't escape from the book to create something unique inspired by it but independent nontheless. He remained very attached to Kundera's work to such an extent that sometimes the movie seems like a strange lection during which the actors try vainly to add heaviness :-) Kundera defines and explores in his book notions which are almost impossible to by touched upon by visual means. Among them, the notion of lightness and heaviness as a general human state, the notion of the poetic memory, the interpretation of dreams, the distinction between physical attraction and love, the notion of kitsch and other existentialist questions. So the movie was from the start a dangerous undertaking but what did really force this project to be finally realized? We have to bear in mind that Kundera's book received an extreme popularity during the second half of the 80's. A Czech intellectual who moved to France chased by the evil communist government was obvisously an "exotic fruit" who all the intellectuals of the Western world were ready to receive and promote. Moreover, the book touched the topic of illiberality during communism from a totally novel perspective, establishing connections between the social organisation and the inner world of the characters. The love story helped the Western readers to easily digest the political aspects. As a result, the book was not very "heavy" (as for example a book of Solzhenitsyn would be),contained a moving love story and reached easily the young and less hardcore audience. Besides, it is true that the sexual content of the book is delibarately accentuated in the movie (possibly for commercial reasons?). Sex in the book does play a predominent role as in the movie. Additionally, the sexual scenes of the book are virtually inexistent and sex is frequently used as an allegory or base for expressing something else. By reading the book and watching the movie, one can easily observe the huge gap between the perception of sex in the communist world and the equivalent in the western. The movie is dominated by a sexism frequently seen in most western productions (the distinction between western and eastern does not longer exist so I refer to that time) and Kundera would agree that the sexual content of the film is nothing more than another aspect of the Western Kitsch. The female body is perfect and provocative and the viewer plays the role
of a (masturbating) Peeping Tom. It is exactly this difference that led to the invasion of ex-communist countries by the western porno industry during the 90's and 00's. The western sexual kitsch was easily to impose itself by means of money but porno producers were not based only on the poverty of Eastern girls. They found as an ally the different perception of sex that these girls had,a perception which does not condemn sex as something amoral and mysticist. Communism did not put sex on a pedestal and sexism was virtually inexistent in eastern societies. Sex was somthing natural, human in accordance with the human need for pleasure and reproduction. This distinction was be easily seen by comparing the sex content of the movie and the respective scenes as they are described in the book.

If only there were a website that allowed people to search the Internet for answers to this and various other questions. Or if there were an online encyclopedia that offered answers in the form of articles about virtually every topic known to man, within which sources were credited that allowed readers to read further into subjects that interested them. Ah well, one can dream.