We’re going “deep†this week as we Queue up the (2007) French Film “THE DIVING BELL & THE BUTTERFLYâ€, the astonishing true-life story of Jean-Dominic Bauby, a man who held the world in his palm, lost everything to sudden paralysis at the
age of 43, and somehow found the strength to rebound.  This story was first
received in Bauby’s best-selling autobiography The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly, then in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s half-hour 1997 documentary of the same
title, ten years after that Julian Schnable helms the camera in this full length
motion picture. The movie follows Bauby’s story, his
instantaneous descent from a wealthy and congenial playboy and the editor of
French Elle, to a bed-bound, hospitalized stroke victim with an inactive brain
stem that made it impossible for him to speak or move a muscle of his body. This
prison, as it were, became a kind of “diving bell†for Bauby- one with no
means of escape. With the editor’s mind unaffected, his only solace lay in the
“butterfly†of his seemingly depthless fantasies and memories. Because of
Bauby’s physical restriction, he only possessed one channel for communication
with the outside world, his single unaffected eye. By blinking, he not
only began to interact again with the world around him, but incredibly,
authored the said memoir via a code used to signify specific letters of the
alphabet, Mathieu Amalric tackles the difficult role of
Bauby in this film about the final last stand of the human spirit.