The diving bell and the butterfly

This damn movie which makes me cry like shit, the tears and mucus just keep running down I down know to wipe the tears 1st or the mucus 1st.

A heart wrenching movie especially that scene when the father called his son and spoke to him thru phone, even knowing that fact that his son will not be able to answer and talk to him anymore. And seeing a tearful old man, it BREAKS MY DAMN HEART I FELT IT TEARING APART!

The little black humor in the whole movie helps to simmer my depressing mood a little while watching it.

From a charismatic editor-in-chief of French Elle , to his downfall, becoming a totally different looking person within that short period of time. The scene when the 1st sentence the therapist made out from him was "I want death", the scene where his son wiped the saliva from the side of his lips, that scene where the wife has to suppress her emotions and grief while translating that reply from her paralyzed husband to his lover. The ever patience translator and therapists whom went thru all the letters one by one and over and over again with him to form each undying words he wish to say. The scene whereby he was not able to "fight" and defend himself from the housefly which rested itself on the bridge of his nose. Such gesture to fend off a housefly, how many of us will think it's a chore to us? And him, his widen eye ball which twirl and turn and move about and attentively blink to express himself. He just seems like a soul trapped in a Mannequin.

Below is a brief description of the movie you maybe interested to read about:


Jean-Dominique Bauby is stricken with "locked-in syndrome."
CANNES -- Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have performed
a small miracle in adapting for the screen Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography "The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Not, of course, as much as the one it took for the former
"Elle" editor to write the book when he was paralyzed from head to toe and could communicate
only by blinking his left eye.

But their film does justice to the enormous courage and determination of the man and
the caring patience of those who helped him. Taking a very different approach to the
award-winning 2004 Spanish film "The Sea Inside," in which Javier Bardem played a
suicidal quadriplegic, the movie boasts an equally fine lead performance, by Mathieu
Amalric, and matches that film's broad appeal.

A vivacious and charismatic magazine editor, Bauby is stricken at 43 with the cerebrovascular
incident that first plunges him into a coma and then leaves him with what is
called "locked-in syndrome." His brain works perfectly but his body doesn't, save the
left eye. It is from that eye's point-of-view that the film is almost entirely told and
Janusz Kaminski's cinematography does marvels in suggesting the suffocating horror of
Bauby's predicament and the wide variety of images that bring him joy and hope.

A brief period of self-pity is overcome by the painstaking attention of his therapists,
Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze) and Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia), who develop the
pattern whereby he blinks at letters of the alphabet in order to form words and then
sentences. Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his three children, whom he
had abandoned shortly before he had his stroke, also nurses him devotedly.

Among many scenes of tender mercy, she translates when Bauby's new lover calls to speak to
him only to say that she cannot bear to see him in his current state. Celine must translate
his blinking reply: "Each day I wait for you."

There are also heartbreaking scenes between Bauby and his aged father, played with
great compassion by Max von Sydow. Father and son are friends, and in flashbacks and
a phone call made difficult by Bauby's condition and his dad's forgetfulness, their affection
is beautifully conveyed.

There is much humor in the film as the stricken man never loses his wry sense of what
fate brings. He realizes that two essentials in his makeup are not paralyzed: his imagination
and his memory. He uses both to escape from the deep-sea diving bell that he
pictures himself trapped in so he may soar like a butterfly.

Guilt plagues him over his inattention to his children and such things as failing to
return a phone call to a man named Roussin (Niels Arestrup), to whom he gave his
seat on a plane that was hijacked. The man spent four years as a hostage but he visits
Bauby not to chide him for his negligence but to tell how he survived his own locked-in
hell.

It's a theme that Schnabel develops throughout the film and renders with remarkable
subtlety. He is aided greatly by a fine cast, especially Almaric, Seigner and von Sydow,
and by Paul Cantelon's delicate piano score. The soundtrack also features great music
by such artists as Tom Waits, Nino Rota and Lou Reed. It begins and ends with the
song "La Mer" and that much-heard melody becomes haunting all over again.