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Number 8: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Veteran British screenwriter Ronald Harwood has spent a career churning out serviceable, slightly stagy treatments of elderly novels and plays (sometimes his own). But occasionally they have wild life breathed into them by some unlikely foreigner. In 2002 it happened with Roman Polanski and The Pianist, earlier this year French painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls) performed a similar trick of magic. . For Harwood's decision to script this adaptation of ex-Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir from the first person perspective is, at heart, just common sense. The book, published two days before its author's death, is a shocking insight into what it's like to be a fabulously successful father of three (and lover to many ) one day, then, after a stroke at 43, totally paralysed save for one eyelid. It is with this eyelid - the fluttery butterfly of the title - that he eventually dictates the memoir. Schnabel takes his words, and Harwood's pragmatic translation, then shoots everything with the controlled abandon of an red kite, zipping about the screen, swooping in and out of flashback and reality, fantasy and grim reality with beguiling pyrotechnics. So, it's an astonishing story, an easy tear-jerker, a superb showcase for Mathieu Amlaric (so beguiling here and in Heartbeat Detector, so badly-used in Bond). But, mainly, it's a bonafide piece of art: woozy, blurry, beautiful. (read more)