The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

French Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby had it all.

A job fronting one of the world's most glamorous magazines, a beautiful wife plus adoring children and - being French - a sultry young mistress.

He also got the chance to knock around with the likes of Lenny Kravitz on a regular basis.

Then, on December 3 1995, he suffered a brain stem lesion - in other words a massive stroke - and found himself the unwilling victim of "locked-in syndrome".

What this basically meant was an almost total paralysis of his body...yet his mind and ability to think remained totally unaffected.

Bauby's only means of communication were via his remaining right eye - his nurse would read out the alphabet and he would blink when the right letter came up.

Director Julian Schnabel took Bauby's painstakingly dictated memoir and has cleverly - sometimes a bit too cleverly - adapted it for the big screen.

At the beginning, the audience sees only what Bauby sees – doctors, nurses, visitors, busily bustling around him as if he wasn't there.

Then he discovers a strange form of freedom when he utilises the potent power of imagination to return to his childhood and his life as a serial seducer and sparkling celebrity.

In one marvellous scene he and his alluring speech therapist (Croze) revel in a fantasised seafood banquet washed down with chilled white wine.

There is humour of the gallows variety: the unfeeling doctor who whittles on about skiing in St Moritz while he sews the inert Bauby's left eye shut.

For farceurs, a toe-curling scene unfolds where Bauby's wife Celine (Seigner) is reluctantly obliged to transmit a lover's call from his still smitten mistress.

Most touchingly, we listen to Bauby's regret-laden interior monologue as he rues his lack of devotion to his three children.

Sometimes Schnabel's device teeters towards the laboured and even in hospital - a godforsaken place near Calais - the babelicious nurses make it feel like the medical room during Paris Fashion Week.

Yet Bauby's wryly life-affirming philosophy - beautifully delivered by Mathieu Amalric - never tips into bitterness.

This tender, life-affirming memoir proves to be an eloquent testament to human resilience.

Tim Evans