The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, or Le Scaphandre et le papillon, was nominated in the Best Directing category in this year’s Academy Awards but lost out to the Coen brother’s No Country For Old Men.
While it was the calculated, cold minded violence of No Country that stayed with me after I left the movie, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly had another effect. I was relieved to leave the viewing at its end, because I could.
Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French fashion editor, on whom The Diving Bell is based upon, couldn’t move at all. He suffered a major stroke, and while his mind, sight, and hearing remained intact, he could only blink his left eyelid. Despite this he still managed to author a book.
The Diving Bell And The Butterfly takes you into someone else’s mind, and keeps you there, in a way no other movie has before.
I loved “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, but the movie I’d rather see is “My Stroke of Insight”, which is the amazing bestselling book by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor. It is an incredible story and there’s a happy ending. She was a 37 year old Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke in the left half of her brain. The story is about how she fully recovered, what she learned and experienced, and it teaches a lot about how to live a better life. Her TEDTalk at TED dot com is fantastic too. It’s been spread online millions of times and you’ll see why!
Sounds an amazing story. Are there plans to make a movie of her story?