Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Diving Bell and the Butterfly

This is topic Diving Bell and the Butterfly in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 12-30-2007, 04:40 PM:

I thought I made a mistake choosing this film when the opening titles appeared over a montage of faint X-rays of human bones. But the film had nothing to do with bones or X-rays, thankfully.

If I described this film to you you'd stop reading, but the film was actually engrossing and a positive experience.

................SPOILERS AHEAD!..............................

The film shows the life of a real man, the chief editor of ELLE, a French fashion magazine like the American VOGUE, after
suffering a stroke.

I'm glad I did not have to project this film unprepared, for the opening is deliberately dark, grainy, out of focus, and exhibiting every symptom of a disintergrating film apparatus.
That's because we see through the eye of the subject as he awakes from a coma in a bed in a hospital near the seashore in France. We continue seeing from within the victim, who cannot speak nor move any part of his body. He can only blink one eye
to communicate from within his "diving bell" of paralysis.

Yet with the help of two beautiful therapists who fashion an alphabet code based on blinks, he communicates so well that he actually writes the book that forms the material for the script of this film.

Sounds ghastly?

But it isn't--it kept me enthralled.

At Kew Gardens Cinema, New York, Tuesday, December 25th, 2007