Diving bell

We’re camping in for the long weekend. I stocked up on movies to watch in the evenings, we’ll fire up the BBQ later in the afternoon, and we’ll catch up on the severe sleep deficits we both seem to be suffering.

Last night we watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I knew absolutely nothing about the movie, and the back cover copy provided no hints as to what it was about. I seemed to vaguely remember hearing positive things about it, so I took a chance. It was a fascinating look at “locked-in syndrome,” the situation where a fully cognizant person becomes trapped in a functionless body. The only thing that works for the protagonist is one eyelid (the other was sewed shut to prevent it from dying completely). The title is a metaphor for his two stages of life after the stroke that disabled him at the age of 42. At first he is just trapped in a dive suit, sinking, sinking, sinking. Then he reaches a nadir and decides to stop pitying himself. He transforms, using his imagination to go on trips. He also learns to communicate through the horrifically tedious mechanism of listening to someone read out the alphabet, sorted into order of frequency, and blinking when the other person reaches the next letter. He even writes a book that way. It’s based on Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, the memoir written by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby (former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine). It’s a powerful movie, that starts out completely from Bauby’s POV and then branches out to a 3rd person camera view after he transforms.

Also intriguing, the appearance of Max Von Sydow as his father, speaking fluent French.