The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
2007 · Movie · 112 min. · France
At 43, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the rakishly successful and charismatic editor in chief of French Elle was a man defined by his passion for life. On December 1995, he suffered a massive stroke and his brain stem was rendered inactive. In these few bewildering moments, his life was forever changed. After lapsing into a coma, he awoke 20 days later to find himself the victim of a rare locked-in syndrome - mentally alert but permanently deprived of movement and speech. Refusing to accept his fate, Bauby determined to escape the paralysis of his diving bell and free the butterflies of his dreams and imagination. The only way he could express his frustration, however, was by moving his left eye. These movements and blinking a code representing letters of the alphabet became his sole means of communication. Slowly -painstakingly- words, sentences, paragraphs and finally an affecting and life-affirming memoir emerged.
Direction Julian Schnabel
Cast Mathieu Amalric · Emmanuelle Seigner · Marie-Josée Croze · Anne Consigny · Patrick Chesnais · Niels Arestrup · Olatz Lopez Garmendia · Max von Sydow · Jean-Pierre Cassel · Marina Hands · Fiorella Campanella · Talina Boyaci · Gérard Watkins · Michael Wincott · Jean-Baptiste Mondino · Emma de Caunes · Anne Alvaro · Jean-Philippe Ecoffey · Zinedine Soualem · Isaach de Bankole · Françoise Lebrun · François Delaive · Agathe de La Fontaine · Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre · Philippe Roux · Franck Victor · Azzedine Alaïa · Farida Khelfa · Lenny Kravitz
Soundtrack Paul Cantelon
Screenplay Ronald Harwood · Jean-Dominique Bauby
Cinematography Janusz Kaminski
Original title Le scaphandre et le papillon (Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
7.4
19K votes (FilmAffinity)
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