It’s only then that he truly considers the alternative to death, and his mind soars from the diving bell of his useless body to the butterfly of his memory and imagination. The episodes of his life — past, present, imagined — fill his mind and the screen seemingly at random. But a pattern, or an inevitability, emerges, and the film returns at last to Charles Trenet crooning the bittersweet “La mer” in the opening frames. The song plays in Bauby’s convertible as he takes an increasingly erratic ride, the last of his life. Like a variation on Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or Jorge Luis Borges’s “El milagro secreto,” Bauby’s seeming affliction is a temporary reprieve from, and the ultimate reconciliation with, death.
