The Diving Bell and Butterfly- See this movie!!!

[chinton]

I don't know how many people on this board has seen the movie but anyway I finally just got around to seeing this. All I have to say is if you have not seen the film see it now. What an excellent excellent film. The film has a distinct visual style and really makes you feel like you trapped like the main character in the film. If you do not know the story its about a man who suffers a stroke that paralyzes everything but one eye and eventually blinks an entire book. Its an amazing story and the director really does a great job in making you realize what a shocking story it is.

Also if you think the movie will simply be about amazing visuals wait til you get to the scene where his father is talking to him over the phone while the main character is unable to do anything. It will break your heart.

I cant say enough things about this film. There's nothing negative to say about the movie. Much like There Will Be Blood, Jesse James, No country, and the underappreciated Zodiac this is a film with a director fully in control with the medium.

Please see it now!!!!!!!!



10/10

[MisterChristian]

It is indeed an amazing movie. Really moved me!

[Digifruitella]

good film indeed

8/10

[Lazy Boy]

Yeah, I raved about this film when I saw it as part of the AFI fest last November, made a topic about it in the Current Film section...haven't watched it since, but I do own the DVD and plan on setting a night down towards watching it with some friends. I'll just paste what I wrote in that topic:

The "truly remarkable true story" biopic has been a staple of cinema for several years, but most of the time, the content itself is more awe-inspiring than the actual presentation. Earlier this summer, I reviewed La Vie en Rose, a pretty substandard biopic with a stunning lead performance that lifted and carried the film without the exact opposite even happening. Sometimes, the common man is of more interest to me than some big hotshot celebrity who died in a blaze of glory or at the bottom of a bottle -- Christy Brown, whose bout with cerebral palsy inspired the film My Left Foot, was another man whose talents arose from what little he was given when so much was taken away. Javier Bardem, the current flavor of the year, played a similar role in The Sea Inside, but that film was let down by its director and boring lack of visual beauty. The genre has been crippled and paralyzed, so to speak, by filmmakers' lack of making this stories visually interesting, until director Julian Schnabel has come along and forged himself into the great line of auteurs.

Julian Schnabel is a painter by trade, and his foray into directing has produced him three features; before this, there was Basquiat and Before Night Falls. The Bazinian definition of "auteur theory" would have it that Schnabel is indeed the sole visionary behind this canvas, absconding with a marvelous technical ingenuity that is not solely about bells and whistles. Remember the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, following the wretched cemetery bookend? Spielberg's narrative may have been a pile of cornball pap once cresting that bloody and cinematically triumphant D-day invasion sequence, but everybody who talks about that film still points to that first third as a marvel by everyone's favorite populist. Schnabel does the same with his own thirty minute war zone, or in this case, the after effects of the paralyzing blow to Jean Dominique Bauby's body. We see what he sees, hear what he hears, and are privy to his thoughts that will go unshaken even when he realizes no one will hear him. Elliptical cuts to black signify Bauby's left eye blinking open and shut, his only mode of communication. Things get hazy, things get dire (his other eye is sown shut, and this is perceived behind that particular eyelid as the needle draws in and out, slowly darkening our (and his) world. Praising Schnabel's achievement alone is like singling out Jesse James just as long as you forget the other riders along the way. Janusz Kaminski -- the road the Oscar is only blocked by Roger Deakins' work on No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but it's no mistake that Kaminski achieves something incredible for the first act, and then challenges himself to fascinate us with more beauty from memories that are not our own, but ones to which we can entirely relate (childhood, romance, success, downward spiral, etc.).

Beginning with the French tune "La Mer" over an x-ray, pre-credit style, Schnabel indeed shows us how useless the exoskeleton of the odds over ends story is useless without the soul to inhabit that frame. Mathieu Almaric isn't viewed full on until the camera turns on him around the thirty to forty minute mark, confining him to a wheelchair with a paralyzed droop on his face that constantly reminds us of his "locked in" syndrome, giving the film its title -- the weight of the diving bell (or suit) in which he finds himself trapped, versus the vivid butterfly of his imagination as he wills himself out of his corporeal cage in great flights of fancy (in one instance, he regards himself as Marlon Brando). Almaric is a slightly less ferret-like encantation of Roman Polanski, and he has a similar sleaziness the director brings to his roles and films -- make no mistake, this isn't a dour, "why me?" exercise in Shakespearean tragedy. Wry in his sexual observations of the female form, willing to laugh at his own flaccid tropes and hideous, Dali-esque portraiture (with many a closeup of his bulging left eye, blinking like a Cyclops), and being a bit of an obstinate person in general (he tells his wife, against whom he seized many an opportunity for a secondary fling, that he doesn't want to see one of his children). Playing his father is the great Max von Sydow, a legend of Ingmar Bergman films past, and his Pere Bauby is a ladies man well into his ripe old age -- a close shave from son to father is enacted over a picture of the young Bauby, one generation to the next -- but, in only two scenes that he is in, von Sydow's manly bluster gives way to a feeble, loving and scared old man who truly loves his son. It's a fantastic performance, and award conglomerates are known for giving the old timers one last ride into the sunset. Let's hope he gets something for his efforts here (Almaric, too).

I viewed this film several weeks ago at the AFI film festival, and it was deemed to be the audience award winner (as well as the last showing of the festival). The film spoke for itself, and I was greatly moved, but if there is anything wrong, it's not in the path it takes to get to the inevitable conclusion -- there is a book, after all, published by Bauby about his travails -- it also felt like the artist himself was locked so much in his condition that an entire backstory, seen in flashback, feels tertiary to explaining or understanding this man fully. But, like any work of artistry, Schnabel paints a picture with some of the best visuals possible, displays it to the public, and reaps his benefits and rewards. One of the best films of the year.

Rating: 8/10

[APzombie]

Good review.

A really, really wonderful picture. One of the few films in the past few years I saw multiple times in theaters.

[Digifruitella]

has anyone seen last year's Palme d'or winner? cos that one was also great

[Lazy Boy]

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days -- great film, also seen by me at the AFI fest. What a great opportunity to see films, and I was lucky that it was in competition at that showcase. I thought Anamaria Marinca gave the best female performance of 2007.

[someguy]

I was disappointed by Diving Bell and 4 Months. They weren't bad of course, I'd probably give both a 7/10 but I didn't fall in love with them like others did.

Both movies had a ton going for it but I just didn't jive with them as a whole. Diving Bell had fantastic directing and did a great job with the whole POV style but I just didn't care much for him at the end. The only effective scene for me was the phone call with his father but outside of that I felt pretty indifferent.

4 Months had tons going for it. I'm a huge sucker for that documentary feel the movie had but I just didn't really care at the end of it. I did feel like if the references to communism were removed it could have doubled as some sort of spinoff in a poor area of the Children of Men world (of course the plot would make no fucking sense but still).

I will say that Diving Bell made France seem like a factory for beautiful women. I pretty much have a huge crush on Marie Josee-Croze now thanks to the movie.