We see flashbacks to his children, to his mistress, to his fantasies. And also with lust, hunger, humor and all of the other notes that this man once played so easily. Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve. The result is not what you could call inspirational, because none of us would think to be in such a situation and needing inspiration. This is not an easy way out, because everything in the film is resolutely filtered through the consciousness of the locked-in man. His solution, arrived at with screenwriter Ronald Harwood, is not to show merely the man in the bed but to show what he sees, and those around him, and his memories and fantasies. It was a superhuman feat, but how could it be filmed? The director is the artist Julian Schnabel, who has made two previous films about artists creating in the face of determined obstacles " Basquiat" (1996), about a New York graffiti artist, and " Before Night Falls" (2000), about the persecuted Cuban poet Reynaldo Arenas. By this method, word by word, blink by blink, he dictated his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, published in 1997, shortly before he died. A speech therapist ( Marie-Josee Croze) suggests a system of communication: They will arrange the alphabet in the order of most frequently used letters, and he will choose a letter by blinking. The man was Jean-Dominique Bauby ( Mathieu Amalric), who was the editor of Elle, the French fashion magazine, when he had his paralyzing stroke. The film is based on a real man, and the book he astonishingly succeeded in writing although he could blink only his left eye.
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