Julian Schnabel relates another true-life tale from the wide world of art, this one a little more liberated from convention than his Basquiat or his Before Night Falls (though it immediately and continually brings to mind Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside), the tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor at Elle magazine, who in the prime of life suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed but for his left eyelid (and his imagination and his memory), and who dictated a memoir, letter by letter, through a system of blinks. The first three-quarters of an hour or so are reasonably audacious, subjectively visualized through the eyes of the invalid (Mathieu Amalric, at this point unseen), with cropped faces and figures, blurred edges, off-kilter angles, etc., and yet the camera looks awfully free-swinging and the editing awfully jumpy for the P.O.V. of a paralytic, as if Schnabel felt he had to lend a helping hand to keep things hopping. (The rotation of comely coquettes to serve as speech therapist, physical therapist, and amanuensis seems to have been assembled out of similar motives.) Much of the remainder of the film feels drawn out and padded, with the major exception of a tense scene in which the wife, operating the speakerphone in the hospital room, is required to mediate a call from the mistress. The essential subject matter is one that demands in its treatment purity and rigor, and that receives instead disorder and indulgence. (This really wasn't the time and place for further proof of the director's hip taste in music, U2, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits.) A big critical favorite, nonetheless, perhaps owing to the special dispensation granted the handicapped, the quickness to applaud the least little show of humor, verve, perseverance. With Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, and Max von Sydow. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd