Paralysed by a severe stroke, left with the use of just one eyelid, the former Parisian playboy and magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking it out, letter by agonisingly slow letter. It's not the kind of book that cries out for a cinematic adaptation. But in the hands of the director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood, the film carved from that memoir is an extraordinary work.

Its boldest decision is to imprison the audience for the first 20 minutes with Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) inside his broken body. It’s a remarkable piece of film-making - credit must go to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the film, and also to Schnabel, whose painter’s eye brings an impressionistic, atmospheric beauty to the cold, clinical walls that surround the helpless patient.

Through Amalric's irreverent voice-over and the way the camera - standing in for Bauby's one fuctioning eye - drifts down to check out the cleavage of each new nurse, Bauby's incorrigible personality is captured as effectively as his physical plight.

12A, 111mins

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