The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

[Scott Warner]

Saw this yesterday and was very moved by the experience. It's the film adaptation of a memoir written by a former editor of the French Elle magazine. What makes this a special memoir is that the high-living editor had, at age 42, suffered a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed with the exception of his left eye... which he later used, through the development of a system of blinking binary (i.e. one blink is yes, two blinks is no) responses to letters spoken to him by those around him, to dictate the entirety of his memoir.

There are pretty basic themes throughout (i.e. live in the moment, death, triumph of the human spirit, et all) but the experience of the movie is unlike anything I've seen before. Recommended.

[kid cue]

i enjoyed it but i guess it didn't move me to feel anything beyond what i expected ... the story itself did most of the work IMO, with all the other creative/arty touchstones basically in the right place (first-person perspective, dream/psychological footage, quirky narrator as counterpoint). it was hard for me to have much of an opinion beyond "how sad" and "nice job".