Ten Great Foreign Films Of This Decade

The Sea Inside

by Anna Pulley

“The sea gave me life—then it took it away.”

The sea is a risky metaphor, at once universal and cliché, and if not executed with just the right nuance, power or beauty, can become a Blue Crush or Deep Blue Sea. Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside is a film that succeeds precisely because of this central metaphor, the vast and unattainable sea, as provocative as it is unforgiving and the ways in which we crave its destruction are much like an unrequited love - we have no choice but to submit to it utterly, irrationally, despite all emotional evidence to the contrary.

A brutally elegant tale, The Sea Inside tells the real life story of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), a Spanish quadriplegic who fought a 30-year campaign to end his life. Exploding tensions between the world as it should be and the world as it is, The Sea Inside is far from a typical euthanasia movie. Indeed, it is an affirmation of life through death, as Ramón infuses everything and everyone around him with a sense of purpose, dignity and brilliance. Central to the unwavering humanity of his struggle are two women: Julia (Belén Rueda), his lawyer, who has a degenerative fatal disease known as Cadasil and Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a single mother who saw Ramón’s TV ads and felt compelled to dissuade him from ending his life. Both women end up falling in love with him (it was hard not to) and the scenes they share with Ramón are the most devastating to watch because they intersect precisely at the place where love and loss coincide. There’s a particular scene where Ramón and Julia share a cigarette together. It’s a simple scene with very little conversational fanfare, but the intensity of their connection, coupled with the helplessness of their conditions, is like a visceral plundering. “What good is it to be optimistic?” says Julia, after a heart attack that leaves her crippled and forces her to recognize that life cannot exist without freedom, which is something Ramón had been trying to explain to her from day one.

In the end, The Sea Inside is not a film about making people understand, but about making them feel. Amenábar captures this feeling with astringent clarity through his use of color and motion. Ramón’s inability to move is juxtaposed with continual, bracing camera movements - sweeping slow pans, bicyclers, carts, windmills, swirling conversations, and of course the relentless and persistent motion of the sea, which we are drawn back to again and again much in the same way that Ramón relives the moment of his accident, the moment where he ceased to be alive, each and every day of his life. The use of motion beautifully balances Ramón’s stasis. In his fantasies, everything is fluid and tactile and the viewer feels it as intensely as if we were there with him, from his daily flight over Galicia to the tender sting of Julia’s embrace. The Sea Inside is a psychological and emotional interrogation, one that confounds the nature of existence and alters our conceptions of what it means to love someone. “The person who truly loves me will help me die,” he says. And you believe it. Like Ramon’s paralysis, you have no choice but to believe it and accept it.

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