The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I went to see this a couple of days ago. I'd read the book last year, so knew what to expect in terms of content, but it brought the book to life in a way that I wasn't really prepared for. I'd heard great things about the film - Mark Kermode (on Radio5Live), thought it should have received the Oscar for best foreign language film, but apparently the French didn't submit it for some bureaucratic reason. Was it becuase it was directed by an American, even thought the subject-matter, and its cast were resolutely French? Ridiculous.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because a) Oscars don't matter inthe grand scheme of things, and b) its haunting, lingering quality will resonate for a long time in the hearts and minds of everyone who sees it.
The cinema was about three-quarters full - pretty good for a teatime showing and, as usual at the Watershed, everyone was rapt throughout and sat silently. People usually know how to behave here, but this film wouldn't probably have attracted the casual customer anyway.
The film begins inside Jean-Dominique Bauby's head as he awakes from a coma after a major stroke - his brain, vision and hearing functioning perfectly but realising that he cannot move or speak, or commuicate on any level. We see what he sees; a fragmente, blurred, view of what is directly on front of him, and we share his feelings of isolation. Gradually, with the help of a dedicated speech therapist, he learns to communicate - 1 blink for 'yes', 2 blinks for 'no', and eventually 'writes' a book. I suppose if something like this had to happen to anyone, at least it happened to someone with the gift of irony. He was the editor of Elle magazine; someone in the prime of life; wealthy, successful, celebrated, handsome, with the world at his feet when he was struck down with a stroke that left him with 'locked-in syndrome', when the only muscle that moved was one eyelid.
Jean-Do (as everyone called him) was played, superbly, by Mathieu Amalric, who captured his previous incarnation perfectly. I have a friend who had trouble with the book, as he felt so little sympathy for Bauby and didn't feel particularly impelled to see the film. Well, Amalric brought him to l;ife, and yes, I can't think of anyone who would have ever wanted to be his friend, but the film offered a different angle, a rather more oblique point of view, using music, memory and stunning photography to enable its audience to get inside his head.
Its unsentimental, and unself-pitying, and we leave the cinema thinking about what it is to be human - what is the minimum we need to keep us going.
Another bonus was Max Von Sydow, one of the greatest of film presences, playing Jean-Do's father, who is elderly, crippled and alone. There are 2 wonderful sequences - one when Jean-Do remebers giving him a shave, and the scene encapsulates perfectly what it means to age and become dependent on your children, yet at the same time always feeling responsible for them.
As Philip French notes, 'Jean-Do's experience is what we'll all come to in the end - spectators in our personal galleries of memories'. It's film which touches on the universals of life, and I've rarely found anything as rewarding and fulfilling for a long time.