Ten Most Redeeming Films of 2007

A poignant biopic of famed French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby who fell into a coma after a massive stroke and woke up with locked-in syndrome, a very rare condition in which his entire body's paralyzed except for the left eyelid, with his mental capacities intact. He was able to communicate only through the blinking of his eye.

The film brings you into the perspective of Bauby, literally at the beginning as the lens of the camera portrayed itself as his eye, writhing with panic and disorientation until it becomes oriented and swiveled with limited scope. Figuratively, such perspective plunges you into the core of his mind, him depicting his condition as being locked in a diving bell--slowly plummeting down the ocean, sensing the pressure of the depths, with him and the sound of his voice trapped inside the bell. But apart from his eyes, there are two things that aren't paralyzed, his imagination and his memory, symbolized by a butterfly earnestly wriggling out of its cocoon and flying away. His imagination and memory freed him from his deadened physical self.

It is one of those movies that triggers human sentiments but won't make you cry (at least for me it didn't), instead leaves you with a note that truly it is not the cups that matter, it's what inside the cup, the quality of your life that will matter. Bauby in his locked-in condition did not ruminate about the car he drove or his position as the editor-in-chief of Elle France Magazine, but remorsed for the women he was unable to love, the chances he failed to seize, and the moments of happiness he allowed to drift away. He even asked himself if he have been blind or stupid, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show him his true nature.

The movie likewise illustrated some reality in the world we live in (those I noticed along the way), like desperately clutching into anything that will save you from your seemingly hopeless state such as soliciting chants and pleas to the assortment of world deities, whereas one truth holds, that is The Way alone; and infidelity being a status quo, with Bauby having a mistress and still favoring (in terms of love) the mistress over his wife, which he considered not as wife but only the mother of his children, despite her faithfulness. It's wrenching and disappointing (and not giving the movie poster with the face of the wife its due), that I had to let go of one star.

But overall it's one worthy movie.