He recounts that even with limited facial expression, he still has varying emotions each time he is cleaned or given a bath. Sunday: Bauby dreads Sundays as there as no visitors of any sort, friends or hospital staff, besides the rare nurse. On December 8th of 1995, the editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby, suffered a massive stroke which severed his brain stem from his spinal cord and rendered the worldly, charismatic, fashionable man nearly completely paralyzed. The problem is that mixing his factually accurate journey through locked-in syndrome with a personal life that has been fictionalized for film has affected real people who were intensely involved in Bauby's life before and after his accident.

Some of the most emotional moments occur when he greets his young children at the beach for the first time after his stroke, a telephone "conversation" with his 92-year old father (Max Von Sydow), and flashbacks to his youth - driving with his girlfriend, shaving his father, supervising a fashion shoot, and taking his son on a trip in a new sports car. Harwood tells a slightly different story: Pathé wanted "to make the movie in both English and French, which is why bilingual actors were cast"; he continues that "Everyone secretly knew that two versions would be impossibly expensive", and that "Schnabel decided it should be made in French". Tourists: The author says Berck, the hospital, focused primarily on the care of young tuberculosis patients following the Second World War.Mallon, Thomas (June 15, 1997) "In the Blink of an Eye - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," The New York Times.

When he woke up twenty days later, he found he was entirely speechless; he could only blink his left eyelid.Mathieu Amalric was unusually charming as Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Max Von Sydow was heartbreaking as his lonely widower father. The cast is fantastic, from Amalric to screen legend Max von Sydow, and the beautiful women in Jean-Do's life (Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny and Emmanuelle Seigner, among others).