Every month, I look through the movie selection on my HBO account and set aside anything that looks like something I might want to see. Sometimes I don’t necessarily know a lot about it, and such was the case with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. HBO’s plot description gave me a little bit of an idea, but the actual movie was not something I was overly aware of.
Imagine my surprise (and delight, truth be told) to realize that it was in French. I didn’t know HBO put much in the way of foreign language films into their catalog, so this was sure to be something different if nothing else.
The movie opens with an eye opening up as a man looks around to see he is in a hospital. Various doctors and nurses rush in to check on him, but even though the audience can hear his voice, the other characters apparently cannot. We’re seeing everything from his point of view, and will continue to do so for the first third of the movie, but for now, all we see if the growing realization that the mystery man whose eyes we’re seeing through can’t really move and no one can hear him say anything. The existential horror of it all doesn’t take long to sink in, and it isn’t alleviated much when an older doctor comes in and promises two beauties will soon be taking care of the patient, one Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), known to his loved ones as Jean-Do.
As it turns out, Jean-Do, a writer and editor for various publications, actually agrees with the older doctor’s sentiments: his speech and physical therapists are attractive women, and neither of them seems inclined to give up on him. Jean-Do’s movements are limited, essentially, to his left eyelid. His right had been sewn shut to protect the eye underneath, but Jean-Do soon realizes he isn’t completely trapped. He has access to three things: his left eyelid, his imagination, and his memory. Beyond that, he can’t really move much at all.
What follows shows his speech therapist coming up with a way for Jean-Do to communicate with the outside world in a technique involving blinking as a patient individual recites the alphabet. This system gives Jean-Do a means to finish a book he was contracted to write, turning the thing into a memoir about life trapped in his own body, a phenomena he describes as being like either stuck in a diving bell or bursting from a cocoon like a butterfly. He’s poetic, and the audience can even see he has something of a sense of humor about his situation since he can narrate thoughts that people around him can’t hear. And, in various flashbacks and daydreams, we get to see what sort of a life he led before his sudden stroke at the age of 43. Stuck as he is, he can appreciate the beauty and love around him, but he misses things like being able to hug his children, good food, and better sex.
Man, does he miss sex.
This movie was just about perfect, and the only real flaw I can note was how some of the scenes of Jean-Do picking out letters show a few differences between the French words he’s spelling and the English letters the subtitles are showing. Inspiring in its own way, the movie doesn’t make Jean-Do out to be a saint or anything. He’s just a man trapped in his own body, with only his imagination there to stimulate himself and make what’s going around him interesting. Based as it is on a true story, I would say that I really hope that never happens to me, but if it somehow does, I hope I take to it half as well as the late M. Bauby.
Grade: A
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