Le Scaphandre et le Papillon,..........

Last night I checked out a french film called, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly". It's been nominated for best foreign film in this year's Oscars, so I thought it would be worth my time. (dang it, I think I missed that new reality show "my dad is better than your dad", oh well.) In my own words, the film is about a man named Jean-Dominque Bauby who is the editor of a French fashion magazine, but soon suffers "locked-in syndrome", which basically means he is paralyzed. The story unfolds with him learning how to communicate only using his left eye. A speech therapist enters and slowly changes his life. She has developed a speech system receiting the alphabet using the most recently used letters first. He will then choose which letter he wants by blinking. Slowly but surely (and amazingly) he learns to communicate with those around him and even penned his memoir called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly before he died in 1997. One of the remarkable feats this film acomplished was the ability of the director to show us almost entirely the view point of Bauby. You literally see the majority of the film through his left eye. It's taxing at times, and the director does ask a lot of the viewers, but I believe it was rewarding in the end. The film doesn't inspire as much as it shows the heroics of a man. I know this all sounds a bit heavy but the cinematographer, "Kaminski fills the screen with life and beauty, so that it's not at all as depressing as it sounds"(Ebert). In the end, it just ends up being a beautiful yet sad movie. I'll depart with Andrew Sarris noting, "gets off what may be the single most French line of all time," which is, "Having a mistress is no excuse for leaving the mother of your children; the world has lost its values." Kinda funny.

listening to right now: Melatonin by Silversun Pickups

Jean-Pierre Chula