Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly


Just finished watching the movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly".

No doubt that it's a nice movie. The real story of Mr. Bauby who suffers a stroke and lapse into coma. After 20 days of coma, he gets mentally awake but physically paralyzed. He can only see through one eye and there is some movement in his head. A transcriber recites the letters to him until he chooses the letter with a blink of left eyelid. With the help of 200,000 blinks, he gets his book written.

The book gets published in March 1997. It receives excellent reviews, gets 150,000 copies sold in the first week, and become a number one bestseller across Europe. Ten days after the book gets published, Bauby dies of pneumonia.

The movie at times gets slow. I almost loose my patience and feel like pressing "forward", when the trancriber repeats reciting the same order of alphabets, but then I try to connect myself to the character and feel the helplessness.

n I feel depressed.