Watched the film adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and am still breathing hard, letting the contents unfold within me... The story chronicles the Soviet military occupation of Prague during the 1960's and the lives of the philandering surgeon Tomas and his ingenuous wife, Tereza, whose meek docility unravels throughout the film as she must stand up to a love which carries a burden as heavy as the airiness it permeates. Their lives ever increasingly endangered by the afflictions of war and a deadening fear looming still throughout Czechoslovakia, the couple must navigate the fragile waters of their relationship amidst a politically turblent climate and a string of sordid affairs with Tomas' ever increasing bounty of lovers.
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The film is at once beautiful as it is terrible, calamitous and conversely, tender, with Tereza's wide-eyed innocence surrendering a deeper and quieter strength as she beseeches Tomas, "How can one make love without being in love?" To Tereza, there is nothing "light" about love or its sexual expression. Despite the staunchness of her sentiments, her inordinate earthiness carries the film and lends an ironic lightness and quickness of feeling- she is the redeemer, the light in the darkness. The fleeting quality of the film echoes Kundera's explorations of life, most in its vaporous brevity as life passes so swiftly, without a second return. How can one afford to attribute any meaning or weight to life if they live it only once, unable to reflect on its passage or return to take a different path? Without the ability to compare lives, Kundera argues, we cannot find meaning, finding in its place only an unbearable weightlessness.

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While the book and it's accompanying film incite penetrating philosophical thought and contemplation, more so, the movie sheds light on life's host of multitudinal paths, each governed by the irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, "a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight." Happiness can only come about with repetition; the Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return, says Kundera.

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Kundera writes ever poignantly (and truthfully):

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The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? — Milan Kundera