The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

In light of this not winning an oscar and not even getting put forward by the French as their contribution to best foreign language picture I thought i would put forward a quick review of it.

In 1995 at the age of 42 Jean-Dominique Bauby, the Editor-in-chief for the French fashion magazine 'Elle' suffered a massive stroke. He spent 3 weeks in a coma and when he eventually woke up he discovered he was completely paralyzed. He had a condition called 'locked in syndrome' in which he retained all of his mental abilities, his hearing and clarity of thought but was unable to speak or move any part of his body which the exception of a single eyelid.

He spent his days in a hospital on the coast of France near Calais. It is there that a speech therapist devised a method of dictating the letters of the alphabet in the order they are used the most until Bauby blinked. Amazingly Bauby spent more than  a year painstakingly dictating a book using only his eyelid. The book, a memoir on his life and filled with the thoughts of a man in his position was 'Scaphandre et le papillon' or 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'. This movie is of course an adaptation of his book.

The Diving Bell is how Bauby sees his own predicament, stuck in heavy suit, unable to move, miles below the surface of the sea. The Butterfly is the girl his book publishers sent to spend a year of her life with him and turning his blinks into words.

Julian Schnabe has made a very impressive and brilliant film here. Over half the film is told from Bauby's point of view, his view on his world from a single eye. The techniques used to give the illusion of looking through his eye are very clever and work extremely well. A few flashbacks are employed to give us a sense of Bauby's world before his stroke and occasionally we are taken outside his body and we see him sitting in his wheelchair in a vegetable state. But the film is at its most strongest when seen from bauby's POV.

This all may sound depressing but surprisingly it is not, it is very moving, incredibly interesting and even very funny at times but depressing it certainly is not. Bauby is obviously an intelligent man and his stroke never affected his brain at all, when people speak we hear his thoughts as a narration and that does make for some laughs. One instance I remember is when a friend comes to visit and tells Bauby that people are calling him a vegetable, Bauby keeps asking him "what? what vegetable?" but his friend of course cannot hear him and just carries on talking regardless.

I really really recommend this movie very highly, It will make you realize how lucky you are and make you really appreciate the world around you more. It is also however a very entertaining film, very engaging and really well made.



*It is amazing that had this been allowed to be nominated for the best foreign language picture it would have won it easily. But France never put in forward as the Director was not French but Dutch. The Academy really need to get their act together with regard to foreign films and do away with the one nomination per country rule and just reward the best films regardless of where they are from.