Thursday, August 21, 2008

Scaphandre et le papillon, Le (2007)

aka The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
A very inspiring movie. It depicts the struggle to connect, to the world and to our own soul. Capturing this as an image is done very cleverly in this movie with a brilliant cinematography and wonderful dialog that inspired from the book itself.

Before I confuse you more, the story(it is a real life story) in short goes like this. It's about a 40 something man, an editor of ELLE, who gets locked up in his body, a medical condition called, "locked-in-syndrome". This is described to be the closest to being buried alive. His brain fully functions but the only way he can communicate is by blinking of his left eye. The only part of his body that he could move. And with that he manages to write a book, of his frivolous life before and of his dreams he creates in his head being locked in.

The movie is shown from the view he gets of this one eye that he could blink, or rotate but restricted beyond. Imagine see the world with one eye when you cant move your body or neck. We see how the people come in and leave while he struggle to be in sync with the reality following them through his restricted gaze. And when that is broken he falls back into his own world of imagination and memory. The dialog is equally brilliant. It borrows the intense words from his book, "The diving bell and the butterfly" that he is writing. And with a background of the repetition of the french letters based on frequency of usage E, S, A, R, I, N... it constantly reminds us the difficulty with which such intense ideas are expressed. The sound track is wonderful too... I loved the song "All the world is green". Though the story sounds very sad, its narrated in a high spirit so don't delay in watching it thinking it will be too gloomy.

3 comments:

Narendra said...

hey beautiful review..coincidentally netflix recommended this movie to me also..when i ordered Il Postino..how does the name of the movie relate to the movie.. quite a interesting name..The Diving Bell And The Butterfly..

Pallavi Damera said...

see the movie you will understand better... the protagonist see himself locked up in a diving bell in his condition and when his imagination is firing he sees himself as free and fluttering as a butterfly

Surrendered Emotions said...

it is a wonderful way of visual storytelling - especially the first 20 mins - when the protagonist is actually behind the camera all the time! I saw this and Cloverfield on the same day - very similar mode of story telling where the story of the protgonists are told by what others do! amazin ... but the review is kind of butchered! :)