This is a true biographical sketch of a French Journalist Jean- Dominique Bauby who was once the editor of fashion magazine ELLE. In 1995, he had a heart stroke and that left him fully paralyzed with a rare condition – lock-in syndrome. This is his story from his eye view. Despite his condition, he authored a book by blinking his left eye-lid when a correct alphabet was uttered by a person. It is a painful process to write a book with such a pace. Not only for Jean but it requires enormous patience from the side of the one scripting the alphabet to form words and sentences. Jean died 3 days after the book was published.
The tagline of the film is: let your imagination set you free. But what I get from the film is that, I didn't understand enough how beautiful the life is, how strong my body is. When I saw him unable to speak or to move his head and whose only means of communication was to blink one eye – one blink for yes, two blinks for no. When the therapist recites the most-frequently used letters in the French alphabet, Bauby blinks when he wants to choose a letter .These scenes enable me get to know that I can fluently express “I love u” to my families & lover, and made me wonder if I make too little effort to communicate when it seems easy to do so.
Schnabel says that his purpose in making the film was to tell "the story of all of us, who surely do face death and sickness. But if we look", he says, "we can find meaning and beauty here." People may trapped or imprisoned in different ways, still, life is a powerful and emotional journey.
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