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| The Diving Bell and the Butterfly | 
 enlarge | Actors: Anne Alvaro, Niels Arestrup, Jean-pierre Cassel, Patrick Chesnais, Isaach De Bankole
Studio: Miramax
Category: DVD
List Price: $29.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  58 reviews
Sales Rank: 2372
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 112
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.7
MPN: DISD55967D
UPC: 786936750119
EAN: 0786936750119
ASIN: B00104QSOC
Theatrical Release Date: December 25, 2007
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: ******BRAND NEW****** +++English ,French And Spanish Languages Available.+++** Over 1.5 million orders shipped worldwide and more than 500 000 items in stock, BUY FROM A TRUSTED SOURCE, ESTABLISHED SINCE 1998 - INETVIDEO ~~~
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| Customer Reviews:
 The beauties of life...written at a few words per minute February 1, 2008
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
"Locked-in Syndrome", a fate worse than death afflicts Jean-Dominique Bauby in this true story of the final chapter of the remarkable life of the Elle editor and famous Parisian. With a healthy mind and a useless body, Bauby experiences the horror of only being able to communicate with the outside world by closing one functioning eyelid. Adding to his torturous existence is that Bauby's mind was meant to be shared with the world. As an author, editor and shining member of the intellectual elite, Bauby dazzled those who came in contact with him. When his body died, his great thoughts did not go away. He could not turn off his creativity, his dreams, his desires or his memories...he just had no way to share them.
The first half of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" details the opening months of that living hell. One could not think of a worse existence than being in a hospital room with a TV turned to an off-air station during the overnight hours when it blares an alarm. With no way of changing the channel or asking for help, he suffers for what must have seemed like an eternity. His days are filled hating the sights of endless doctors, specialists and therapists, all motivated to help their "famous patient", hope not shared by Bauby. All he gains from these visits is an occasional cheap thrill as he's able to ogle one of the many young, Elle reading specialists who dote over him like a superstar.
Nearly all of these scenes are filmed from the POV of Bauby, with his internal thoughts providing sardonic commentary to the action in the hospital room. This provides an uncomfortable presentation, as the audience experiences the realities of his life and thoughts. Once a solution to his communication problem is presented and a system is developed where his eyelid movements spell out his words and thoughts, he's able to slowly (V e r y S l o w l y) communicate with the world again. What begins as a devastating declaration to his therapist of "I W a n t D e a t h" eventually grows into his memoirs. The book titled "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", penned at one blink at a time becomes his last gift to the world, a collection of his dreams, his regrets, and his loves.
Bauby's book is the work of a dying man dreaming about living again. Not angry or jealous, he wants one last chance to speak about the beauties of life, from the love of a great woman to dinner at Paris' finest restaurant. Scenes of his book are dramatized in the film and come across as strange Charlie Kaufman-like creations where images from his healthy life blend with his hospital setting and are often colored by stories from history or fairy tales. Dramatized on screen, the film gives the audience a glimpse into the most important organ of the human body, one that goes on dreaming, loving and hurting long after the rest of the body has given up on life.
Oscar Contender Alert - Remarkably Powerful Film December 13, 2007
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
Generally, films containing series of disassociative images, tons of POV shots and dream sequences are immediate turn-offs for me. I like my films to have stories and I like those stories to be linear. For the most part.
So, it is more than a little surprising that I liked Julian Schnabel's new film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" based on the life of Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's life. In fact, I didn't just like it, I loved it. It is a great, moving, well-made film.
Jean-Do (Mathieu Almaric) wakes up to find himself in a hospital room in a resort on the coast of France. He quickly learns he is paralyzed from head to toe, cannot speak, and can only blink one eye. As the doctors and their staff visit and do their tests, he learns the prognosis is not good, but they go ahead with more tests and try to help him learn how to adjust to the new life, to rehabilitate him. His estranged wife Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze) visits and can barely look at her husband. One of the physical therapists, Claude (Anne Consigny) is brought on to try to help him learn how to communicate again. She has developed a system; she holds up a card listing all of the letters of the alphabet in the order they are most commonly used. She begins to rapidly go through them. When he hears a letter he wants to use, he blinks. As the words begin to form, she suggests a word. If it is the correct word, she blinks. Jean-Do contacts his publisher, with the help of Claude, and arranges for a transcriber to help him write a book about his experiences. Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner, "The Ninth Gate") arrives and to help him write and cope with his life. Writing the book helps him to remember back to key moments in his life, including interactions with his father, Papinou (Max Von Sydow).
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is really a fairly remarkable film. Schnabel uses all of those elements I mentioned previously, the ones I hate, to evoke what Jean-Do is going through. The film opens with a series of flashes and brief glimpses of objects. We hear Jean-Do narrating and feel his confusion as he tries to figure out where he is. Weak, he can barely keep his eyes open. He quickly realizes a series of doctors are fawning over him, trying to figure out what has happened to him. Schnabel uses a series of quick shots, overexposures, brief images and more to give us a feeling of what is going on in Jean-Do's head. Naturally, he is confused and disoriented and we get a real feeling for that.
This actually goes on for a while, longer than I would've believed possible in order to maintain any sort of narrative. But because we are inside the patients head for so long, we get a real feel for what he is experiencing. As we listen to his narrative, which are essentially his thoughts, and see what he is seeing, in brief glimpses, and learn what he learns, Schnabel and actor Mathieu Almaric paint a remarkably vivid portrait of this man who can only move one eye.
Many actors have portrayed paraplegics in the past, and been richly rewarded for their work with Oscars. Almaric's performance blows them out of the water. For the first twenty or so minutes, we don't even see the actor, but we get a feeling for his character, for his frustration, for his desperation. We are listening to his thoughts and this gives us a great picture of what he is feeling. When we do finally see Jean-Do, we already have a feeling of what this character will be like.
In a film like this, there are usually glimpses into the characters life before the sickness hits, generally told through flashbacks. In "Diving Bell", there are surprisingly few flashbacks to his life before the sickness. These aren't really needed because the actor gives us glimpses of this previous life through his performance. When we do see a glimpse of this life, it is necessary, to help establish a character we haven't met yet, or to set up an event later in the film. One such moment happens when Jean-Do remembers a time when he visited his father, Papinou (Von Sydow) in his Paris apartment. Papinou, an elderly man, is confined to second floor apartment because he can't get up and down the stairs. Jean-Do visits him and gives him a shave. It is a touching moment, filled with emotion because they clearly love each other very much.
The process of writing the book comes to fill the majority of the second act of the film. It is a laborious process, but as jean-Do and Celine get the hang of working with each other, they become more productive. Yet, Jean-Do can't help but comment about how slow the process is, the pains they go through getting accustomed to one another, and more. As Celine gets to know the former magazine editor better, she begins to sense what he is trying to say after he picks up a few letters. In fact, everyone close to him does the same thing. These moments are very helpful to the viewer because they help to show he can communicate and it would become overly tedious if we had to sit and watch him.
All of these moments point to one thing; a filmmaker who knows how to compose the type of portrait he wants to paint for the audience. He doesn't want us to observe Jean-Do and look at the paraplegic and moan about how tragic his life is. He wants us to experience the life and the pain of this life through the subject's eyes. It is a remarkably different type of film portrayal than we usually see and it is extremely effective. Rather than remark about how wonderful Robert DeNiro is or how great Daniel Day-Lewis is (and they both were, in their own rights), Schnabel wants us to see every facet of this man's life. But more importantly, he wants us to see how he deals with all of the problems of being completely immobile. Think about it. A French man who is barely middle aged, living a life many of us would dream about, suddenly wakes up to find he can only move one eye and can't communicate with anyone. Confined to a bed and a wheel chair, he must find new ways to converse with his family and friends and the world. So, Claude is a bit of a godsend, when she arrives and announces she has come up with her new communication system.
But the remarkable thing about "Diving Bell" and Almaric's performance is that this is not the only way he manages to communicate. Amazingly, given the actor is portraying someone who can move only a single part of their body, Almaric makes his character very emotional. With a puffy, permanently pouting lip, an effect of the stroke, Alamric merely looks forward and manages to convey a lot of what Jean-Do is feeling. Because the film so quickly, and effectively, establishes the problems Jean-Do has, we carry this feeling throughout the film, as we watch him convey his emotions with merely a blink of the eye. But as the story progresses, he gets more emotional when he realizes his situation will have more lasting effects and tears swell in his eye.
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a remarkably powerful and moving portrait of a man who suffers a fate more horrible than most of us can imagine.
 Untrapped Imagination February 13, 2008
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
Jean-Dominique Bauby was living the life most people would want to live. He was a successful magazine editor, he had a children that loved him, and women were at his disposal. Then he suffered from a stroke and developed what doctors labeled as locked-in syndrome. For those unaware, locked-in syndrome is a disease that renders the patient almost completely paralyzed, and it's been described as feeling like the victim is buried alive. Bauby winds up in this condition, unable to do anything except move and blink his left eye. While the state of his health gives him great grief, Bauby would eventually pull himself out of depression and write a memoir of his life entitled "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," which has now been made into a great movie. And yes; it's a disease movie.
Unlike most disease movies though, where we see the character deteriorating in front of our eyes, the movie begins from the perspective of our protagonist, and stays with that perspective for most of the film. Only when Bauby decides to be grateful for his life do we get to see the world through everyone else's eyes. Another thing that's worth noting: Because we see the world through Bauby's point of view, the movie may make you feel queasy at the beginning. Stick with it though, because wonderful images are not far behind. Though he can only move his eye, as he monologues "aside from my eye, the only things that are free are my memories and my imagination." As if to prove his point, when he gets sick of his restaurant food, he simply pictures himself eating at one of his favorite restaurants with a beautiful woman by his side.
At times he pictures himself as a butterfly, breaking out of the cocoon that holds him prisoner and exploring the world and it's wondrous beauties. Some people may criticize that these wonderful images may glorify the disease, but I disagree. Not every person takes getting sick sitting down. While some do accept their fate and prepare for death, others do the best they can with what little health they have left. I think this movie does a great job at making this clear, that while Bauby is a prisoner of his own body, he is also freed from his chains and, in a strange way, may be truly appreciating life for the first time in his life.
Though there have been many movies made of various diseases, I think this is one of the few I've seen that gives the audience a deep understanding of what it's truly like to have to live with it. For most of the film you feel as trapped as Baudy is. Some people even left the theater. Yet it's also one of the more inspiring movies of the year, with a touching message and a deep understanding of it's characters and subject matter. Directed brilliantly by Julian Schnabel, "The Diving Bell and the Butterflies" is one of the best films of the year. Not only is it one of the best films of the year, chances are you will be taking a hard look at your own life when it is finished, and you may even feel grateful for the life you do have.
Rating: **** and 1/2 stars
JULIAN SCHNABEL, OPUS 3 March 8, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
**** 2007. Directed by Julian Schnabel. Two awards in Cannes, two Golden Globes and four nominations for the Oscars. Based on a true story, the film tells how Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of Elle magazine, left paralyzed and speechless after a cerebrovascular accident, dictated letter by letter his book The Diving-bell and the Butterfly. This remarkable movie is also a very interesting study about cinema and the way to conciliate subjective and objective points of view. Highly recommended.
 Good, But No Masterpiece May 1, 2008
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is yet another 2007 film that fails to live up to the hype. Don't get me wrong, this is a good film but not a great one.
Of course, there are some good moments in the film: 1) the phone call from the mistress when the wife is present is a very moving scene. 2) Father's Day with his children on the beach. 3) Of course, Max von Sydow was excellent and his call to his son was very cathartic, one of the best moments in the film.
Now for the criticisms. For one thing, the filmmmaking is rather clumsy. For example, the image of the deep-sea diving suit is used not once but at least a half-dozen times throughout the movie. The metaphor is not that interesting to warrant the constant reprise of this image. Indeed, all of the visualizations of the title seem rather uninspired and bland - butterflies flying around and a deep-sea diving suit. Basically, it's just making a visual equation of the title - a very easy thing to do. My problem is that the image didn't give birth to the title, but the other way around, which makes it stupid to use it over and over.
In fact, there is little to this movie beyond the title, which provides the basic metaphor of the film. Although weighed down by his physical parlysis, Bauby is still able to reach great artistic heights due to the exercise of his imagination. In fact, the film feels the need to have Bauby's amanuensis Celine essentially state the titular metaphor of the film: "You are my diving bell but also my butterfly" - something like that. All of this is rather heavy-handed and obvious.
As far as the film bridging the subjective and objective, this only amounts to the tired technique of the camera acting as the character's eyes with voiceover. It is well-handled in this film and doesn't plumb the depths of the laughable voiceover work as "Awake" did. But still, there is nothing very original or daring about all this.
Now, I've never read the book, but I hardly intend to. And I wouldn't say the film is not moving in a general sense, as are most films of its kind. However, it has nothing to offer that other such films about struggles against physical adversity don't. Essentially, it is an embodied cliche, the familiar storyline of the physically challenged person first expressing anger/pity at his state and then sublimating their sufering through imagination/creation. Only the details have been changed. Just to compare, I think "My Left Foot" is a much better film, more moving in its portrayal of a caring family and reaching a deeper emotional state of the protagonist, whose emotions don't seem as perfunctory as in this film. (For instance, Bauby states at one point "I no longer pity myself" - a rather too pat turnaround for his character I thought and just too straightforward an observation to ring true).
Listening to the director Schnagel talk on the bonus features was painful. Like ever other filmmaker, his film addresses the profound questions of life and death. Oh gee, what a surprise. "It was essentially a self-help exercise to help me overcome the fear of death." (Sounds like a solipsistic exercise.) "I'm not a filmmmaker - I'm a painter." Well, I can believe the last one, because this is not that well-directed of a film. I feel like it could have been better. (Schnagel's pontifications reminded me of Werner Herzog's observation that whenever filmmakers talk about their work it is embarrasing and undignified, whereas an ordinary person always seems to retain his dignity before the camera.)
Don't get me wrong: I respect Bauby, but the film does not seem to do his story justice. For example, despite their screen time together, Bauby and Celine's relationship is actually not explored that deeply when you think about it. The movie dwells on the surface and never really addresses the deep questions that it professes to, unlike the work of truly masterful filmmakers like Bergman and Kieslowski, to name just two.
But, of course, this is just my opinion, and I'm sure many of you will disagree.
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