The Sea Inside

Alejandro Amenábar made The Sea Inside at thirty-two, after the genre exercises of Open Your Eyes and The Others had made him one of the most internationally promising directors of his generation. The film is something different from those, slower, more intimate, less interested in formal puzzles. It is also the project that won him every major European prize, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005, and the Golden Globe in the same category.

The film is based on the real-life campaign of Ramón Sampedro, a Galician fisherman who became quadriplegic at twenty-five and spent twenty-nine years pursuing the legal right to end his life. Javier Bardem plays him under heavy aging prosthetics (Bardem was thirty-five at the time of filming, Sampedro was in his fifties) and won the Volpi Cup at Venice for a performance that operates almost entirely from the neck up. The technical achievement is impressive; the emotional one is greater.

What distinguishes the film from comparable European right-to-die dramas (Haneke's Amour, the Belgian Quitter la nuit) is its refusal to argue. Amenábar gives equal weight to those who love Sampedro and want him to live and to Sampedro's own quiet, unwavering position. The Catholic Church, his family, the legal system, his lawyer Julia (Belén Rueda), and the village neighbour Rosa (Lola Dueñas) all hold positions the film respects. Sampedro died, by his own hand, in January 1998. The film became part of the public record of how Spain finally began to talk about it.