contemporary world cinema for salmon arm and kelowna |
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Country: France/USA
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By turns dreamlike, brave and breathtaking, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is the beautiful adaptation of Jean-Dominique’s Bauby’s affecting memoir. Once a successful fashion editor and carefree womanizer, Bauby awakes one day to find himself a prisoner in his own body. He has been paralyzed by a massive stroke that renders him powerless to move a muscle, except his left eyelid. Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) and his nurses develop an ingenious, if exhausting, method of communication, through which he painstakingly writes his memoirs. By listening to the letters of the alphabet and blinking when the correct one is uttered, he is able to preserve his final link to the outside world—the winking butterfly that frees him from the diving bell of his broken body. As the audience is shown more of Bauby’s life in flashback, the lines between dream, memory, hallucination and consciousness begin to falter, granting insight into the mind of someone in a near-vegetative state. Bauby wrestles with feelings of regret over missed opportunities. When he was healthy, Bauby was desensitized to life. Now trapped in an immobile body, he is reborn. “Almost unbearably poignant … Amalric is perfect within the tightly circumscribed parameters of his role.” Variety |
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