The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

What helped clue me in to how I felt about this one was seeing the poster on the way out. As I looked at the beautiful woman whose face occupied the top half of the poster, I felt less of a connection to her than I did before I saw the movie. There were no gentle cooing noises in my ear. No pangs of nostalgia over our times together. And no real palpable remnants from the movie itself either.

Perhaps it is an inherent difficulty in the subject matter, but I failed to bond with the film on the emotional level I wanted, and needed to. There were at least two scenes where I knew I should be crying (or tearing up), where the culmination of what had come before gathered to a head, but I remained distanced.

This isn't to say that I was unmoved. The performances were appropriately sincere. I liked and respected all of the characters. The film was beautifully and ingeniously shot, the camera offering almost no shots outside of the POV of the protagonist for the first 30-40 mins or so. But this could be the problem. I needed a swelling, grown from an emotional current flowing throughout the movie. But instead I felt jarred between the memories and fantasies the character delves into to escape his condition, and his condition itself. The other characters were kept too far away. The happinesses of the past were fragmented into glimpses only and never gelled into a larger fusion, consuming the film and existing as part of what was going on.

Also, we are denied a sense of the dehumanizing effects of Bauby being completely paralyzed, except for his brief thought of suicide. Instead he seems bemused going back toward put out most of the time. I liked that this character (whether or not he was representative of the actual person) had a sense of humor about his condition, which made it easier for me, as an audience member, to deal with the topic. But there has to be some sort of connection made between what he is doing because of his condition and the effects of the condition itself.

But it's still a good poster.