FILM - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I tried to picture the Hollywood “pitch” for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (not that there was one, this being a foreign film). “I want to make a movie about a book that’s a memoir of a guy who had a stroke and could only move his left eyelid. Think ‘My Left Foot,’ but it’s ‘My Left Eye.’”
How this film (yes: film, not movie) got funded is anybody’s guess, but we’re all the better for it. In some of the most haunting, surreal, and life-changing camera work and direction ever to hit the big screen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly takes the viewer inside the thought of a stroke victim. It is tragically amusing. The viewer is almost ashamed to watch, the voyeurism is so profoundly upsetting. The performances are quiet and subdued; it’s really the writer and director who are performing, but the result is a powerful, sometimes magical, often whimsical, tragedy that has Oscar(R) winner written all over it.
27 Jan 2008
How this film (yes: film, not movie) got funded is anybody’s guess, but we’re all the better for it. In some of the most haunting, surreal, and life-changing camera work and direction ever to hit the big screen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly takes the viewer inside the thought of a stroke victim. It is tragically amusing. The viewer is almost ashamed to watch, the voyeurism is so profoundly upsetting. The performances are quiet and subdued; it’s really the writer and director who are performing, but the result is a powerful, sometimes magical, often whimsical, tragedy that has Oscar(R) winner written all over it.
27 Jan 2008
posted by Ridley at 4:16 PM
1 Comments:
Now, that sounds interesting! I remembered when I brought my mother home after a major stroke from the hospital. I went out with a "her" money, and bought her a big screen TV..to place in her bedroom...(something she always wanted but didn't want to spend on herself) and she didn't even watch it.
It took me some time to realize that because of her stroke, she could only see one side of it.
Yeah, I was dumb. And yet, there were dozens of nurses that knew what I was going to do, yet said nothing. Somehow, when these things happen, the doctors and nurses don't have much time to explain much of anything to the family caretakers.
They should have a website, for simple things like this.
I will look for that one Ridley, thanks.
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