There is little doubt that this film is an excellent film when judge by most criteria, and yet there is something about it that stopped me for really embracing it to my heart and loving it like so many others have.
The photographic technique used from the start of the film to give us, the viewers, the same sense of disorientation and confusion that the main character feels on waking from his coma works wonderfully. Like Jean-Do Bauby himself we have to piece the narrative together ourselves, which we do with the help of his returning memory, the visits from his 'wife' and children, the beautiful physio and speech therapist and the telephone calls from his aged father and his mistress etc. As we piece the narrative together we learn more about this paralysed man, his past, his fears and his hopes for a non-existence future.
As you would expect from a film of this class the acting is superb, with Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Do outstanding, bringing a real dignity to the role. It was also good to see Max Von Sydow as Papinou, Jean-Do father, showing us an elderly man as trapped in his flat as much as his son is trapped inside his body.
So then, given all this, why did I not take to the film as much as I would have expected to? It is difficult to explain, but I felt distanced from the main character, who before and after his stroke occupied a world as foreign to myself as any strange lands. Also, because the other characters all played second fiddle to Jean-Do I did not feel as much drama between them as I felt there must have been in reality (this is, after all, based upon true events). Finally the 'tear jerking' phone call between father and son - via the interpretor and "writer" of the book - felt somehow flat and lacking in real emotional depth. Maybe on the night I watched it I was not in the right mood, or maybe the film just failed to hit the right note for me, but either way it was a film I came out off feeling more admiration for rather than real affection.
The photographic technique used from the start of the film to give us, the viewers, the same sense of disorientation and confusion that the main character feels on waking from his coma works wonderfully. Like Jean-Do Bauby himself we have to piece the narrative together ourselves, which we do with the help of his returning memory, the visits from his 'wife' and children, the beautiful physio and speech therapist and the telephone calls from his aged father and his mistress etc. As we piece the narrative together we learn more about this paralysed man, his past, his fears and his hopes for a non-existence future.
As you would expect from a film of this class the acting is superb, with Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Do outstanding, bringing a real dignity to the role. It was also good to see Max Von Sydow as Papinou, Jean-Do father, showing us an elderly man as trapped in his flat as much as his son is trapped inside his body.
So then, given all this, why did I not take to the film as much as I would have expected to? It is difficult to explain, but I felt distanced from the main character, who before and after his stroke occupied a world as foreign to myself as any strange lands. Also, because the other characters all played second fiddle to Jean-Do I did not feel as much drama between them as I felt there must have been in reality (this is, after all, based upon true events). Finally the 'tear jerking' phone call between father and son - via the interpretor and "writer" of the book - felt somehow flat and lacking in real emotional depth. Maybe on the night I watched it I was not in the right mood, or maybe the film just failed to hit the right note for me, but either way it was a film I came out off feeling more admiration for rather than real affection.