I KNOW, SOOO 2007!
I've just gotten home from spending the 4th of July with some family friends. After dinner, they sought my advice about which DVD we should watch, and so I ran through the major players from last year's awards season. Upon realizing they had not yet seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—a film I first saw at a private screening in early November, then watched on DVD three different times with three different groups of friends in order to make sure they saw it, and still have not tired of—I aggressively urged them to give it a chance... as the good folks at Miramax found last awards season, though, it is anything but easy to coax people into watching a French-subtitled movie about a stroke victim during their leisure time, least of all on a happy holiday! Nevertheless, they relented, and by the end of the evening were, like the other groups of friends with whom I had watched the film, completely awestruck. Reactions of first-time viewers like these, as well as my own sense that the film holds up strongly on multiple viewings, lead me to believe that Diving Bell may well be the 2007 film that most impresses cinephiles years from now. Don't get me wrong: I still adore the characters who populate Juno, and respect the craft of No Country, and admire the ambition of There Will Be Blood, and revel in the brilliance of Gone Baby Gone, and enjoy the rollercoaster of Michael Clayton, and embrace the humanity of Lars and the Real Girl, etc., but the longer that Diving Bell saturates in my mind, the more I feel that each and every frame of it is a carefully considered piece of art, filled with layers of meaning, and that even one false move by screenwriter Ronald Harwood, director Julian Schnabel, or cinematographer Janusz Kaminski could have easily ruined the film, and yet there were none. If you haven't yet seen it, get on it. And if you have—or once you do—check out my conversations with star Mathieu Amalric, who plays Jean-Do (and will next play the villain in the latest James Bond installment, Quantum of Solace) and with supporting scene-stealer Max von Sydow, who plays Papinou, both of whom offer much further enlightenment on the film.
