(2007; French) Without being too facetious, director Julian Schnabel's film, adapted by Ronald Harwood from Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiographical novel, might have been titled My Left Eye. Paralyzed by a stroke except for his left eye, Jean-Do re-emerges from despair, using his imagination and memories.

In a hospital near Calais, France, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) sees blurrily at first his surroundings (as do we, restricted to his vision), realizing he is unable to speak (we hear his thoughts), though he can hear. Dr Lepage, a neurologist, informs the 41-year-old editor of Elle, a famous fashion magazine, that he has just awakened from a three-week coma after suffering a cerebrovascular accident, i.e. a massive stroke, resulting in his being paralyzed from head to toe, though otherwise physically and mentally his body is functioning normally - a rare condition known as locked-in syndrome.

Only able to move his left eye (his right eye has to be sewn shut to prevent sepsis), he's instructed to blink once to indicate "yes" and twice for "no." Dr Lepage says, "There's hope."

Two very attractive therapists - Henriette Durand (Marie-Josée Croze) for communication and Marie Lopez (Olatz López Garmendia) for physical therapy - spend hours with Jean-Do. By means of a wheelchair, he is transported out of his bed, though in his mind he thinks of himself as confined within a heavy diving bell sinking toward the bottom of the sea.

His first visitor is the mother of his three young children, Céline Desmoulins (Emmanuelle Seigner), whom he hasn't married. "I can never make amends," he silently regrets the manner in which he has badly treated her and the children.

Henriette offers Jean-Do a method to expand his ability to communicate: she recites the alphabet to him - beginning E,S,A, … - arranged in the order of most to least frequently used letters while he blinks once upon hearing the letter he wants to employ for a word. The method initially seems so tedious, he wants nothing to do with it, desiring to be left alone.

Dependent on an IV for his nutrients, he imagines going to a restaurant with Henriette and gorging themselves. Meanwhile, Marie, who tells him she subscribes to Elle, tries to help him learn to swallow.

His next visitor, Pierre Roussin (Niels Arestrup), says he can imagine something like what Jean-Do must be going through. He'd been held hostage in Beirut for four years, locked in a tiny, dark cellar where he recited his vast knowledge of wines to hang on to his sanity. In need of a seat with a full manifest, he'd taken Jean-Do's seat on an airline to Hong Kong, granted the favor of his request, which was hijacked in flight. "Hold fast to the human inside you," Pierre urges, knowing his own feelings of anger, despair, and suicide. "You'll survive."

The first sentence Jean-Do spells out for Henriette upsets her: "I want death." When he overhears someone comment he's become a vegetable, he ponders: "What kind of vegetable?" As well as being a constant repetition each day, life appears to him as a series of near misses involving women, opportunities, etc. Finally deciding to quit pitying himself, he takes inventory: since his left eye, his imagination, and his memories are not paralyzed, he begins to put them to use by writing a book.

Before the stroke he had a contract with a publisher which he wants to take full advantage of completing with the assistance of Claude (Anne Consigny), who very patiently takes "dictation" from his eye. From flashbacks - recalling his visit with his 90-year-old father (Max von Sydow), whom he shaved while discussing Céline and the children along with Jean-Do's ambition to write a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo with a heroine - the camera's perspective broadens beyond its previous restricted view, signifying his own efforts to again embrace the world.

Sundays he dreads because almost no one attends to him; the tv channel remains unchanged for hours. Holding no regard for religious services, he must endure a priest's blessings when Marie refuses to acknowledge his disdain; he remembers a trip to Lourdes with a girlfriend who wanted a Madonna with blinking red electric lights.

Taken to the beach with his children for Father's Day, he apologizes to Céline for being a "zombie dad." His father calls, speaking to his son over a speaker phone in the hospital room, that unable to go out on his own he's experiencing a locked-in syndrome inside his apartment. His lover Ines, who has not come to see him, calls to apologize while Céline is in the room, saying she can't bear to see him in his present condition; by means of Céline he tells Ines: "Each day I wait for you."

His friend Laurent and others read to him from Balzac and other French literature; hearing The Count of Monte Cristo, he identifies with the hero's "moribund state" in having only sight and hearing.

Finally finishing his book with Claude, hearing her call him her butterfly, he begins to sing in a gurgling fashion. Ten days after the book's publication, shortly after his 43rd birthday, left with "ashes of memory," on 9 March 1997, Jean-Dominique Bauby died of pneumonia.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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