Jean-Dominique Bauby, born in 1952 in Paris, France, was the editor-in-chief of the famous French fashion magazine ELLE. As a typical successful person, he has a successful career, lives a luxurious and enjoyable life, colorful and charming.
On December 8, 1995, he was driving with his 10-year-old son to a movie when he suddenly suffered a stroke. Three weeks later, he woke up from a deep coma and became paralyzed by a "locked syndrome" with only one left eye to blink.
Unable to move, he spent two years listening to and reading the blink of an eye—a recorder read each letter sequentially according to the frequency table used by the French alphabet until Bobby used a blink to confirm that it was the letter he needed—and so on, completing the last and only book of his life, Diving Bells and Butterflies.
The diving bell originally refers to an early simple submersible, which was called a diving bell because it was a container with a bottom opening and resembled a bell. The diving bell is a dilemma, like a cocoon possessed, bound to a small space on the bottom of the sea, unable to move, just as Bobby is trapped in a paralyzed body and subjected to tremendous pressure. But his free and uninhibited heart is still full of vitality and vitality like a butterfly flying everywhere.
In March 1997, "Diving Bells and Butterflies," which took an average of 2 minutes per word with more than 200,000 blinks, was published, and Bobby left the world just 10 days after his new book was published.
In "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", there is no pessimism of self-pity and self-pity, nor the disillusionment of the collapse of the world, between the "Diving Bell", which symbolizes the imprisonment of the body and the pain of fate, and the "butterfly", which symbolizes the memory of thoughts and the broad imagination, Bobby chose the latter, he in the form of prose, he told his unique keen feelings and sense of humor about life, sensual and poetic, delicate and moving, touching thousands of readers.
Bobby wants to tell people that cherishing the moment and feeling the fun of every moment of life is the most important part of life.
In 2007, director Julian Hsunabe brought Bobby's story to the big screen, and just like the original, the movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was well received as soon as it was released, and was nominated for major awards such as the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
This is a movie with a known ending, the male protagonist is not an omnipotent hero who opened a plug-in, nor will he overcome the disease and restart his life because of amazing willpower and good luck. The director treats the relatively monotonous picture very delicately and beautifully, and presents many of the protagonists' physical and mental pain very closely and realistically with the subjective lens of the first-person perspective.
In order to make the audience feel the intensity further, the beginning of the film feels helplessness through the first-person perspective, as if incarnating as the protagonist himself, through that vague and narrow perspective, and Bobby, who finally woke up after several days of coma.
The atmosphere and situation created under the subjective lens successfully grabbed the audience's attention and mind from the beginning, and the director very delicately exposed Bobby's condition, appearance, and subsequent life step by step.
First, the illness is revealed by the doctor and the therapist, and then the audience is accompanied by Bobby, seeing in the mirror his paralyzed eyes and crooked face, and then the bigger impact is that he will be brought to his lover.
Even if he couldn't bear to let his wife see him in such a state, Bobby, who only had one eye to blink, could not express his will.
The advantages of the image allow the film to pull the audience to the state of the protagonist more quickly than the book, experience his pain, and reflect on his own happiness.
If the original text of "Diving Bell and Butterfly" is Bobby's memories and imaginations of his life through unfortunate encounters, then the movie "Diving Bell and Butterfly" is to let the audience experience Bobby's self-feelings when recording himself in a more intuitive way.
When people read books, they may read more "butterflies" after Bobby's rhetoric, but in the film, the director tries to create the "diving bell" that should be more significant through the creation of pictures and atmospheres, so that the viewer also falls into the "had to" state of confinement.
One-third of the film is through Bobby's fixed narrow perspective, seeing blurry wards, marquee doctors, nurses, friends, relatives... Examine the beauty and helplessness of this world.
When the speech therapist found a way for Bobby to communicate through the "blink of an eye," "I want to die" was the first sentence he spelled out.
The clichéd inspirational film routine is clearly not the style of French films, although it is an American director, julian Schnabe resisted the pressure of the filmmakers and taught himself French, insisting on using the French soundtrack to retain the protagonist's most authentic and original personal style.
Therefore, the film also continues the literary style of French cinema, slow and quiet, between the lines that are not many, presenting many still scenes or empty mirrors, and the inspiration and emotion brought about by the relaxed viewing process rely on the thoughts and feelings that the audience has caught most for themselves, rather than the exciting soundtrack that rings out at a specific moment.
The repeated repetition of the alphabet in the film, listening to the continuous cycle of sounds like a prayer, it takes Bobby several minutes to spell out a short sentence, a process that makes it easy for the audience to be patient even when watching the movie, let alone experience the pain.
This makes people feel the wonderful power contained in the human soul more deeply, even if the body carrying it is only a moving left eye, it cannot prevent it from releasing the wisdom and beauty it contains.
Bobby, who slowly began to accept the reality, did not begin to blindly reflect on life, he laughed at himself, and imagined eating oysters in the free soul world, romantic affair with his lover, etc. In Bobby's memories and imagination, there are sweet, frustrated, regretful, ordinary...
Like every ordinary person, we are always accustomed to the people and things around us, and we do not find their preciousness until we lose them. Cherish the present, clichés, and a hundred hairs.
From the large number of first-person perspectives in the early days, to the third-person perspectives that gradually withdraw from the second half of the film and the inner narration of the protagonist, the director expects the audience to experience the same mental journey as Bobby. The first-person perspective is like the diving bell that imprisons Bobby, while the third-person perspective and narration represent the thoughts of his gradually flying inner world—the brilliant butterfly.
The camera travels between the brutal reality and the beautiful imagination and memory, and when Bobby's heart conflicts with the behavior and understanding of the people around him, accompanied by his sometimes humorous, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes angry monologues, although it is a cold humor in a desperate situation, it still makes people can't help but laugh.
Under the laughter, the audience feels that Bobby's greatest dilemma is not the threat of death, but that this ocean-wide emotional thoughts are trapped in a heavy and narrow diving bell and cannot be expressed.
His only moving eye seemed to speak, the bloodshot eyeball, sometimes spinning in horror, sometimes glowing with tears, sometimes shining with cunning and ridicule.
French actor Matthew Amalek, relying on his only left eye that can be used to perform, with the tone and tone of his monologue, plays Bobby's originally interesting and uninhibited soul, which is now imprisoned in the body.
And the real heaviness of the movie is when there is no Bobby narration: the walls are full of photos and pictures that tell the past that he has not been able to cherish; the diving bell is floating in the sea, he only has the window of his left eye, others can't come in, he can't get out; he sits crookedly in a wheelchair, looking out at the sea from the high platform, lonely and lonely.
"I can only rely on imagination and memory to escape my diving bell... Lucky times that don't want to be caught, happy times that let go... Was it because I was blind and deaf, or did I have to have an unfortunate light to illuminate my true nature? ”
Bobby's spelling out this cruel and true sentence letter by letter, in contrast to his paralyzed appearance, is particularly regrettable and sad for his unfortunate encounter, and also wakes up people who are self-pitying.
As Bobby recalls his past with his father, he gradually understands that everything in his mind about his father is actually happiness, an important part of the word "father." Because of this, he plucked up the courage to meet his children and spent a Father's Day where the children wiped his saliva.
When his father, who was in his nineties, said to him over the phone, "We both have lock-in syndrome, you are imprisoned in your body, and I am imprisoned upstairs in the apartment." "Such a one-sided dialogue that is bland and the other party cannot respond to, but as sharp as a scalpel, is so lonely and lonely." Although it is heart-wrenching, we are relieved to know that at both ends of the phone, across the diving bell, are butterflies who want to express and listen to each other's love.
The letters are pieced together into words, the words are put together into books, the diving bell is loaded with floating and sinking, and Bobby's life is slowly entering the end.
At the end of the film, at the moment when Bobby accidentally suffered a stroke, the flashback technique returns to the original point, and the world that Bobby has disintegrated due to illness has also been reconstructed bit by bit, through the text, through the delicate lens of the movie, leaving a touch of his own brilliance in the human world.
Film Forecast
Movie Dive Clock with Butterflies
19 January 21:15
January 20 at 5:55 PM
Cherishing the present and feeling the interest of every moment in life is the most important part of life.
Text: Focus
Edited by: Focus, Batam