lena olin

Does a killer title make for a killer movie? When Philip Kaufman adapted Milan Kundera’s early-’80s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the big screen, it made a huge splash at its release in 1988, drawing audience numbers that, at this point in time, are almost unthinkable for a drama focusing on the lives of three characters in communist Czechoslovakia – even if that drama is as erotic and adult as Kaufman’s film was. And how well does it hold up in 2025, both for those who’d seen it at the time and those who are only just seeing it for the first time? Join Sam, Julie and Matt as they discuss the film, its young stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin, the mirrors and bowler hats, and the Bourgeois dreadfulness of late 1960s, early 1970s Switzerland. What made The Unbearable Lightness of Being such a success at the time? Why is it barely talked about almost 40 years later?

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I’ve said before that I greatly enjoy the film historian’s approach that Criterion’s Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema allows me to take to the director’s work. While the films are largely organised thematically rather than chronologically, just having the vast majority of Bergman’s works in one handy package means that I’m not just seeing these films in isolation but in relation to one another. That comparison adds another dimension to my appreciation of the films that is often fascinating and illuminating.

Mind you: the flipside of this is that sometimes it can get quite tiresome to watch yet another Bergman film obsessing about the same concerns and voicing the same attitudes. We’ve now had a series of films of his focused on art and artists and especially the theatre, either literally or metaphorically, starting with Sawdust and Tinsel. By the time we get to After the Rehearsal, a 1984 TV movie starring Bergman regulars Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, and Lena Olin (who looks much younger in this than her actual age of 29), it’s difficult not to give an exasperated sigh: All right, enough with all the theatre!

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