Such imagery illustrates Bauby’s suddenly restricted physicality and expanding imagination, his banality and resilience. On meeting speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), Bauby’s reaction is flirtatious in his own mind. “Am I in heaven?” he muses, as the camera lists toward her breasts and she keeps her focus on the work at hand: “You can blink, right?” She devises a system by which he can communicate by blinking on specific letters spoken by his interlocutor, a technique that enables the writing of his memoir, with a publishing assistant, Claude (Anne Consigny), painstakingly transcribing one letter at a time. “My first word,” he tells himself, “is I, myself.”

While Diving Bell extols Bauby’s will to live, as well as his supreme effort to write the book ("My task now,” he says, “is to write the motionless travel notes, from a castaway on the shores of loneliness"), this first word is telling. For as the movie explores the possibilities of self without the usual, legible indications, it also translates this courage and effort into compositions that mimic Bauby’s previous, prodigious appetites, the “I” he misses and continues to envisage. The movie’s essential trick—the POV imagery that exemplifies a worldview, the mostly stationary frame, warpy wide angles and smudgy pastels emulating his disorientation—is clever, but also limited.