Rama’s SCREEN

A powerful human drama. And when I say ‘human’ it literally means so and everything that’s a part of it. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY is simply an amazing story, a masterpiece beautifully crafted scene by scene. Can you imagine being… imprisoned in your own body for the rest of what’s left of your life? This movie shows you just that much thanks to the brilliant cinematography work by the award winning director of photography Janusz Kaminski who’s done lots of work with Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan)

Jean Do Bauby is a successful editor of Elle Magazine. He suffered from a stroke that left him paralyzed from head to toe. This condition forced him communicate by blinking once for yes and twice for no. In his state of being, he realized though not everything is clear, through his imagination…everywhere and everything is possible.

For the most part of the movie, you watch it through the eyes of Jean Do Bauby, the main character. You blink when he blinks, the camera moves around when his eye moves around, feels like you’re always seeing what he sees using his one eye. It kinda helps because there’s these two beautiful nurses and seeing them this way, up close and all, just makes the audiences such as myself appreciate how beautiful they look. The niftiest part is when they sowed shut his right eye, it’s a movie experience like never before.

It’s all about the camera work here that has made this movie that great, some of you who are not into watching a movie and reading subtitles at the same time might not enjoy it as much. To be frank, the pace is a bit slow but I don’t mind it at all because sometimes you just have to know and be in awe when faced with a sophisticated, artistic film.

This is a guy who wrote a book with only one eye with the help of a woman who’s incredibly patient enough to pen his story by writing down one letter at a time. By watching this movie alone, I think I might already remember by heart the Alphabet in French and I don’t speak French.
It’s very moving picture of a guy willing to embrace life and not let his condition kept him from enjoying everything that life had to offer.
It’s captivating, it’s emotional and surely one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.

This movie makes me want to go back to Paris again, it’s been a while since the last time I was there.
An interesting trivia, Johnny Depp was supposed to play the role of Jean Do Bauby but Johnny had to drop the project due to filming Pirates of the Caribbeans: At World’s End.
Boy did he make the wrong choice!
But that’s okay because I think Mathieu Almaric’s performance was excellent, in fact every actor and actress in this movie did great keeping in mind that they were talking to a camera as if they were talking to you.

* Place the cursor on the picture below to check my grade for this film