The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

After suffering a massive stroke at the age of forty-three, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Amalric), the swaggering, bon vivant editor of French Elle, was left lucid but utterly paralyzed except for his left eye, a victim of the rare "locked-in syndrome." A film in which the central character can only communicate by blinking his one functioning eye doesn't seem the most propitious of premises, but director Julian Schnabel has created an astonishingly lyrical, rhapsodic and viscerally emotional portrait of a man with only his imagination – the free-roaming butterfly of the title – to liberate him from the stultifying confines of his enforced stasis. The first twenty minutes is shot entirely from Bauby's perspective as he wakes from his coma: blurred faces loom above him like underwater visions, and we gasp with relief when the camera finally shifts to a third-person point of view. Moving from stillness to feverish imaginings with a buoyant fluidity, the camera twists and soars through flashback and fantasy, capturing with crystalline intensity the dream-like, hallucinatory world in which Bauby finds himself. Adapted from the extraordinary book that Bauby painstakingly dictated by blinking his way through the alphabet, Schnabel's film is humane, funny and extremely moving. Never indulgent or mawkish in its flights of sensual beauty, this is a film to jump into head first, and marvel. [Laura Smith]