And "Prague Love", I would like to regard it as a story about emotions. The nearly three-hour film could not describe all the details of the story in the detailed novel. The shadow description of the protagonist’s childhood and the description of Sabina’s lover’s wife and children in Zurich have all disappeared. The rest is Teresa. , Thomas and Sabina, who themselves do not have the mission of carrying some kind of philosophical symbol, have become the shining protagonists in the story of superimposed sound and picture. In the transition from two-dimensional text to three-dimensional images, the stories out of context are connected, and there is no third-person philosophical thinking mixed with them.
However, whether in novels that try to get close to the truth or movies that try to present a story, we observe many common and meaningful imagery, such as Sabina's black politeness and Karenin's smile. Karenin's smile is the part that has always fascinated me and fascinated me, and it becomes the finishing touch of the novel and the film that cannot be erased.
In the philosophical book of searching for the truth, the entire six chapters use a calm and restrained tone to convey philosophical thoughts through complicated images. A denial of life and history. "Karenin's Smile" is the last chapter in the book. It is the most tender title, but also, in my opinion, the most careless cruelty. What I see is a kind of sadness - a kind of thorough, humanistic denial. Karenin is a puppy that Thomas bought to relieve Teresa's loneliness. From Prague to Zurich and back to Prague, this puppy always accompanies them in the story and us outside the story, Finally returned to the turmoil of the old countryside. The novel ends with a hint of negativity: At the end of Karenin's life, Teresa finally realizes that her love with Karenin is better than her relationship with Thomas. This feeling is selfless and does not ask for anything in return.
In Kundera's seemingly uncritical, but succinct account, we see the contrast between human and animal nature, and we embrace the argument that happiness is essentially a desire for repetition. But a man with many desires cannot be satisfied with any simple repetition, and cannot be satisfied and delighted, like Karenin, for a fixed croissant every morning. Therefore, in the Bible, man is expelled from the Garden of Eden, while animals are kept. We are human because of this linear and progressive desire. We live on a one-way timeline, time cannot be reversed or repeated, and life cannot be cycled or started over again. It is precisely because of this lightness and linearity that is free from repetition, no matter how one struggles, desires, or pursues, it will never be possible to return to the Garden of Eden and obtain ultimate happiness. Karenin's smile, as the warmest expression of the cold philosophical book, is also a sign of negation in essence. After reading the whole book, all I can capture is the phantom of happiness that remains between the characters and a sadness that is close to the truth. And my only relief is that Karenin's smile, linked to Karenin's death, is still full of warmth - I think it's because Teresa's life was slowly running out. The illusion of life, history, motherland, love, and everything was broken little by little, and she also came to the end of the road. While finding the truth of life, she answered the compromise of the negation of life. How sad this compromise is, but it is inevitable. At the end of the book, we are gradually relieved, and we can only sigh: the lightness of existence may be unbearable after all.
The Karenin in the movie continues the fate in the novel, but it no longer becomes a symbol - "Karenin's smile" is a kind of warmth that is not mixed with any falsehood and is directly revealed on the screen. Perhaps it is precisely because the film is not a film that seeks to approach the truth—the truth cannot exist in the form of comedy, and the truth cannot be obtained in the form of affirmation, so the film and the novel are the opposite, although full of contradictions, sadness, constant of parting, but the attitude it presents is positive and contains an element of affirmation.
At the end of the film, Karenin ends his life smiling as in the novel, but its symbolic meaning here is completely different. Theresa, who embraced Karenin and comforted Karenin, was happy at the moment, a kind of pastoral happiness. She did not succumb to the various failures and blows she encountered before, but returned to a simple life built on simplicity and repetition, which made her feel happy. She saw Karenin smiling, repeating and calling in a low voice, slow and beautiful. What about Thomas? In contrast to the "grey-haired, exhausted, stiff-fingered, no longer able to hold the surgeon's scalpel" Thomas in the novel who is on the verge of death, in the film he is radiant with life, on the dance floor of a country tavern. Staring at Teresa with affection, embracing life in the country.
Some people say that such a setting in the movie goes against the original intention of Kundera's novel. "When you find that you are free without any mission, it is a great relief." Indeed, "liberation" is not the same as happiness, but a kind of relief after compromising with life. This is the narrative in the novel - Thomas's final image is a hare stuck to his face by Teresa in a dream, "This means forgetting that he is a strong man, which means that no one is stronger than anyone from now on."
But from the point of view of the film itself, I think I have to admit that this "Prague Love" by director Philip Kaufman is a good drama. We don't have to blame it for cutting out the philosophical part, because it's a completely new story reworked from the original script. The director tried his best to abide by the "Three Uniforms" of dramatic conflict during filming, so we see that many of the events and characters that happened in the second half of the novel appeared in the first half of the film. The story is basically a linear narrative, with very few flashbacks and interludes. Whereas in Kundera's novel the sprawling characters were reduced to a few supporting roles, the co-op president and his piggy Mephis were the first to appear at Thomas and Teresa's wedding, not at the end of the original They only appeared after a few years of seclusion.
What needs to be clarified is that although I like to present the death of Thomas and Teresa after Karenin's smile at the end of the novel, because this novel does not focus on creating suspense, what we cherish is the space for growth outside the plot, We seek existence in "interludes" and constant "digressions". And when we switched our identities to movie audiences, a kind of suspense was created. After Karenin died, we only learned of their deaths through the letter Sabina received. This kind of expression is very artistic in the film, the use of this flash forward and flashback scene - first depicts Thomas and Teresa dancing in the tavern, and then cuts to Sabina receiving a letter that the two are dead , and then continue to return to the tavern, the camera is slow and elegant, like the last movement of a symphony, lyrical and freehand, putting on the coat of happiness and contentment for the death of the two. "I'm thinking about how happy I am." That's Thomas's final, tender answer in the film. Although quite different from the Thomas image in the original book, it is another lyrical expression. To attribute this lyricism to the "kitsch" that Kundera vehemently rejects is a misreading of cinema—because, in my opinion, it's another story with a different focus.
Beginning with Karenin's smile, the values presented in the novel and the film are clearly different. As an obsessed reader and viewer, I enjoy both identities at the same time and love the two different stories presented to me. For the characters in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", I read it in a way of finding the truth with Kundera - as Derrida pointed out in "Remembrance": "Name" is better than "" people" exist longer. In the process of watching "Prague Love", I experienced the joys and sorrows of the characters in the play. I searched for the joy of influence, and forgot the illusory sorrow that existed in us.
That's why I was delighted to meet Karenin both in the novel and in the film; even though the meaning behind his smile was so different, it was enough to keep me in mind.
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