The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (DVD)

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon) is a French language film made in 2007. The film went on to receive four Oscar nominations and won both Festival de Cannes and Golden Globe awards for best director as well as a Bafta award for best adapted screenplay. With so many awards and so many positive critical reviews my suspicions were raised... so I had to watch it. Synopsis and Cinematography When Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) suffers a sudden stroke he becomes completely paralysed apart from the ability to move his left eye and eyelid - a condition labelled as "locked-in syndrome". His ...  Read the complete review

Having won Festival de Cannes and Golden Globe awards for best director as well as a Bafta award for best adapted screenplay, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly promised to be a treat, although I had been warned to keep a box of tissues handy. Julian Schnabel directed this film based on the book of the same name, written by Jean-Dominique Bauby. At the age of forty-two Bauby, the editor of French Elle, suffered a massive stroke that left him with an extremely rare condition known as 'locked-in syndrome'. He was totally paralysed other than his left eye, comparing his physical state to being weighed down in a diving suit; his imagination and memory, however, ...  Read the complete review

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on the book of the same name, which was meticulously dictated through the blinking of an eye. Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor in chief of Elle magazine suffered a stroke on December 9th, 1995. When he awoke from a coma, his whole body was paralyzed with the exception of his left eye and very limited movement of his head. With his mental faculties still in tact, Bauby's speech therapist devised a method to enable him to communicate in an attempt to break down the barriers of his Locked-in Syndrome. The result was his 139 page memoir which was published just 10 days before he died of pneumonia. The film, directed by ...  Read the complete review

Let your imagination set you free 'I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory'. If you're depressed then don't watch this movie, a truly lugubrious experience. But for some reason the European film festivals love this stuff, arty movies about paralyzed and disabled creative people always adorned with rosettes and garlands, this following up the success of the equally lorded The Sea Inside, there too an artistic sole unable to move his limbs and so chooses to write a book by his thoughts and mouth alone to express that frustration of his personal prison. The juries of places ...  Read the complete review

It's not hard to see why The Diving Bell and the Butterfly gathered 4 nominations at this year's Oscars. It's precisely the sort of tale the Academy loves - the story of determination and triumph over adversity. What's harder to understand is why it failed to convert any of those nominations into awards. The Diving Bell is an extremely moving and powerful piece of film-making. It tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle magazine who, at the age of just 42 suffered a stroke. This left him with "locked in syndrome" - mentally he was totally aware, but was completely paralysed, unable to move anything other than his left eye. ...  Read the complete review