I asked God to take away my pain.
God said, No.
It is not for me to take away,
but for you to give it up.
I think this heartbreaking conversation was the main topic of interest to the filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar to make such a film like “Sea Inside”-Starring: Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda, Lola Dueñas, Mabel Rivera and Tomar Novas .
Amenábar, whose gifts with magic realism and atmosphere were put to great use in his last film, The Others (starring Nicole Kidman), has a gift for capturing actors bound by their own bodies. With Kidman, Amenábar built a gothic prison of her own metaphysic devising; in THE SEA INSIDE, Bardem’s prison is constructed from his own useless limbs.
The story is simple, but the drama is complex. We follow the life of Spaniard Ramón Sampedro. The movie is set in present-day Spain where Ramón is fully paralyzed from the neck down. At first glance, he appears to be happy and content, always smiling and jovial. But, soon, we find out that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. The truth is that Ramón is dying on the inside. He sees no real purpose in his life, since a diving accident when he was a younger man at the age of 25, which we see through flashbacks.
The most thrilling part to me of this film was one of the dialogue of Ramon. He always used to smile & once answered to a question, “When you can’t escape and you depend on others, you learn to cry by smiling.”
Ramon was physically unable to commit suicide. His family won’t help him kill himself and the government says it is illegal. Ramone fought for his right to an assisted suicide for 29 years, but it still was thought illegal. To Ramone, his one quote sums it up best, “I believe that living is a right, not an obligation.”
Julia, a lawyer, is taking on his case pro bono and representing him in the courts. She often visits him athis house to help him build his case. Together, she and Ramón build the case which argued that suicide was a right and that he was being denied that right. First they took it to the courts of Spain, but later, his case drew attention from across Spain and a significant following worldwide.
One would swear that the dashingly handsome, 35-year-old Bardem was a graying man in his mid-50s. This is not simply because of the effective aging done by British make-up artist Jo Allen (The Hours), but also through the subtlety of Bardem’s gestures, movements and speech. No other actor this year was called upon to do so much with so little.
Unfortunately however, Amenabar too often relies on cinematographic clichés to illustrate his characters. The movie is replete with unnecessary close ups, and especially in the first couple of scenes, the insipidness of the cinematography (i.e. to illustrate the difficulty of the paralysis, when the beautiful Julia arrives to speak with Ramon, a slo-mo pan is used going from Ramon’s face, down his body, arm to his hand, which lies helplessly two inches away from Julia’s) is blatant.
The Sea Inside’s opening voice-over—a Sampedro poem about color, texture, and light—calls justified attention to the gliding camera work of cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, who added grace to Almodóvar’s smooth Talk to Her. And indeed, when we’re not forcibly trained on Bardem or distracted by Dueñas, it’s the camera’s perspective that is most compelling. Ramón’s fantasies of mobility involve thrilling defenestration and flight across the countryside. In these moments, and during underwater flashbacks to the tragic ocean dive that snapped dashing young Ramón’s neck, we’re reminded of Aguirresarobe’s hand in achieving the otherworldly atmospherics of Amenábar’s The Other.
Obviously I have sympathy to such people struggling to survive with limitation physically or mentally, but if I were in such situation I would struggle till I had the opportunity to feel the golden rays of morning sun. I want to say them,
Do not become paralyzed and enchained by the set patterns which have been woven of old. No, build from your own youthful feeling, your own groping thought and your own flowering perception.”
Remember-“Visionary people face the same problems everyone else faces; but rather than get paralyzed by their problems, visionaries immediately commit themselves to finding a solution.
After ending the show the first impression that came to my mind and I think also to Ramón’s family members
“If I knew it would be the last time
that I see you walk out the door,
I would give you a hug and kiss
and call you back for one more.”
This film makes me cry. Usually when I sit for seeing film I make 2 or more film seen, but on that day I was totally reluctant to see another film after this-as I did not want to overlap another impression on that. It probably will make you cry but it’s just a sign of how well this movie was done. So what are you looking for?