Songs For Your Day

I have just watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel’s fantastic adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir of the same name (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, in French).  It’s a beautiful movie.  Schnabel’s camera angles, the lighting, the flashbacks.  But especially the music, or rather, the use of music to accentuate a scene.

The scene that really got me is the beginning of chapter fourteen on the DVD.  Take a look at it:

Those first thirteen seconds just kill me.  When the film was over I watched them (those thirteen seconds) again.  And again.  And again.  There’s just something about the way that hair blows in the wind, in, about, and around the rapid strum of the Edge’s guitar that makes me open my eyes just a little wider, breathe just a little deeper.  I wanted to run my fingers through hair like that, with that song playing, for the rest of my life.

In case you, like me, have never heard it before, the song is “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” by U2.  It’s from their 1991 album Acthung Baby, which allmusic.com calls “arguably [U2's] best album.”

Other beautiful scenes in the film include a moment on a boat, with The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” (from 1969′s Velvet Underground), and the end credits, which is reverse film of a glacier collapsing over a song which, despite all the half-assed research I have done, I still do not know the name of.  Guess you’ll have to watch the movie.

-ams

*Also, excuse the video clip past those thirteen seconds.  It sounds like it’s been dubbed in Italian or something.