Still grappling, but...

Still grappling with how to deal with I'm Not There and Dogville. I'm for sure completely in love with Dogville. And not head over heels, but a feeling of I know this film is in my life now, and I couldn't imagine that any other way.

I need to see I'm Not There again, but hopefully not by myself. It is a long film... (let's not even talk Dogville on that account)


BUT...I have to...I must correct my previous statements about my best movies of the year. Now I still haven't seen There Will Be Blood -- it's the last big one on my list, and I also have yet to see the evidently delightful Enchanted and the evidently rapturous Once (coming via Netflix tomorrow!).

Seriously, everyone, the best film of the year is Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), directed by Julian Schnabel from the memoir by Jean-Dominique "Jean-Do" Bauby, which was adapted into an English screeplay by Ronald Harwood from the English translation of the book, then re-translated into a French screenplay by Ronald Harwood. Therefore, I feel it only appropriate to refer to it fully as Le scaphandre et le papillon.

Now, as some may know, I have a grandmother who is dying slowly, and that of course had an effect on me watching a terminally ill, incapacitated person on screen for two hours. Still...

It is so very rare that you see any work of art that actually transforms physically how you perceive the world around you. It changes how your eyes work, before any crap you might say about how your heart works, etc., even as you could, and probably will. The world doesn't look different to me now, I see it differently. I see it perhaps more as it is, but I also see a more beautiful and worthwhile world than we give it credit for. And I see how little influence, control, and power we have over our existence. That knowledge -- not even knowledge, but an awareness -- is disarming. However, unlike many disarming films or other artworks, this continues to disarm you afterwards. Days afterwards. This film is in my life now, and I cannot imagine my life without it. At the same time, in a strange way, one cannot imagine this film without one's life -- without one's participation in it. It requests your participation in its two hour running time to reinvigorate your participation in your own running time outside the theater.

I cannot stress the value of viewing this film. It's not important. It's not beautiful. (It is, but I mean): It just is, and it wants you to know it. And I want all of you to know it. To meet it.

The French word "to know," as in to be familiar with someone, is connaître. In my weird, indirect understanding of the language, this has certain parallels with their words for appear/disappear (apparaître/disapparaître) and to be (être). And then there is also the beautiful addition to the word that becomes reconnaître -- to re-meet, to re-know, to re-turn to one, to re-appear with one another. In this film, due to the illness the man is suffering (he's "locked-in" -- paralyzed except for his left eye, which he blinks in order to communicate) -- he has to re-meet the world, his family, himself in an entire new way. He has to cause himself to re-appear, to re-be, to be re-birthed. I felt similarly to the cold air outside Lincoln Plaza cinema, and walked blocks and blocks to take a different subway -- one I had not taken before. I could not go home the way I do every single day. And I couldn't go home to -- everything?

Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) -- if only one film to see, you should see the film you desperately want to see; but this film wants desperately for you to see -- it, and, everything.