French Connection

Dear Blogger:

Today in Intro to (Media) Arts, we watched The Divine Bell of the Butterfly. It's a French film and after watching a single minute of it, it was pretty creepy, but I'll wait to see what it's all about.

CURRENT TIME: 8:30 AM

Alright, I've watched a few more minutes of this movie and so far, it's a bit depressing, yet familiar to me in the sense that I can almost relate impeccably to the main character, Mr. Bauby. He is a patient who has had a cerebrovascular accident and is now paralyzed from the head all the way down to his toes. He has lost the ability to speak and can only answer "yes" or "no" questions by blinking his eyes. The film is viewed through the eyes of the protagonist and you can hear the thoughts he has which makes this film even more personal than it already was created to be.

The plot goes through his struggle to recover from his stroke, and then it flashes back and forth between his past life and the life he's forced to live now. The first thing we find out is that Mr. Bauby was the editor of Elle magazine. Then we find out that the first visitor to see him is the mother of his 3 children whom he does not consider to be his wife.

The physiotherapist devices techniques for Mr. Bauby to try out to work on his speech and the audience goes through the hassles with him. She has him try to form words with letters she reads to him and also asks him to blow her kisses and to try moving his tongue to the back of his palate to work on swallowing.

I am getting tired of writing this post. I shall leave it at this because I would like to enjoy the movie fully. It's a depressing one, but one that touches me in a familiar way.

CURRENT TIME: 3:33 PM

Alright, I am going to update this again. So after watching the movie some more and in-depthly, it really is a great movie. The perspective, musical scores, and overall composition is exquisite. As I was watching Mr. Bauby go through the hardships of being a demented mute, I could empathize with the pain and frustration he was enduring. I don't know what about the movie really got to me, but I was deeply moved by the performance. Maybe it's because I was almost in that same exact position once or twice of a few times in my life. Aww wellz. I am highly anticipating the conclusion to the movie. Hmm.. I would actually love to see this in Italian, or some other Italian film like this. I think I'll look into films like this over the weekend or whenever I have some spare time.

-Kat