FILM

The Sea Inside
New York Times Review

As the camera restlessly circles the sky and the ocean, taking in the radiance of northern Spain, ''The Sea Inside,'' the story of a quadriplegic activist fighting for the right to die, struggles to transcend the disease-of-the-week genre to which it belongs. Yet there is no escaping the fact that the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a former ship's mechanic seeking a final exit after three decades of agonizing immobility, is defined by its theme.
To its credit, the movie avoids becoming a formulaic dialogue that pits religious and secular cheerleaders against one another in predigested arguments. Even so, the characters (some of them composites) often feel like schematic formulations intended to balance the story. And the deepest philosophical questions posed by euthanasia are only glancingly addressed, most often in Ramón's bitterly ironic remarks. The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book ''Letters From Hell.'' Sensitively portrayed by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Ramón regards his life in the wake of a crippling accident in his mid-20's as a cruel, cosmic joke. In his imagination, he is still as he was before: a Zorba-like force of nature who once sailed the world. Now the only thing sustaining his spirit is his acute mind, which torments him with dreams of a physical life that is just a memory.

In the film's most remarkable sequence, Ramón, bedridden in his family's house in Galicia overlooking the sea, suddenly stirs, then lurches unsteadily to his feet. For a second, you wonder if his condition all these years has been an elaborate hoax, or if a miracle has occurred. As he steals out of the house and flies to the beach to join his beautiful lawyer Julia (Belén Rueda), the Puccini aria ''Nessun dorma,'' which he is playing on a phonograph, swells over the soundtrack, and they fall into a rapturous embrace. Then Ramón snaps to attention. It's only a fantasy that the filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar has milked for its last drop of heartbreaking impossibility. Because Julia, who is helping Ramón prepare his latest court case challenging the laws against euthanasia, is also seriously ill, he believes that she will be especially sympathetic to his cause. When, later in the film, she falls downstairs and calls out for help to a man who obviously can't come to her rescue, the situation feels like an arm-twisting emotional ploy.

Mr. Amenábar, the gifted 32-year-old director of ''The Others'' and ''Open Your Eyes'', is clearly fixated on the shadowy area between life, death and the spirit world. This time he forsakes science fiction and ghost stories to put his spin on a famous case history. On Jan. 12, 1998, the 55-year-old Sampedro ended his life by drinking cyanide in an elaborately planned ritual that was videotaped and shown on Spanish television. His assisted suicide involved 10 collaborators, in addition to a cameraman. Each participant in the step-by-step process contributed to the ritual without having enough knowledge of the process to be legally indicted for murder. After his death, hundreds of supporters of his cause wrote letters, confessing to having aided and abetted him.

''The Sea Inside'' presents a teasing paradox. Unambiguously pro-euthanasia on one hand, it shows how Ramón, bedridden and unable to move, infused many of those around him with a charged sense of life's possibility. Mr. Bardem, acting above the neck (except in brief flashbacks and fantasies), creates a complicated male character, volatile and witty, with a poet's soul. An excellent makeup job has given the 35-year-old actor the thinning, grayish hair and doughy pallor of a physically inactive man 20 years his senior. We meet the members of Ramón's religious farming family, who slave to keep him alive but refuse to help him in his battle to die with dignity. Surrounding him are his father, Joaquín (Joan Dalmau); his angry brother, José (Celso Bugallo), who vehemently opposes any suicidal assistance; Ramón's attentive sister-in-law, Manuela (Mabel Rivera); and his young nephew, Javi (Tamar Novas), who regards his uncle as a father figure. Frequent visitors include Gené (Clara Seguara), a right-to-die activist, and her boyfriend, Marc (Francesc Garrido).

Two women enter his life. The first, Julia, embraces his cause, becomes his soul mate, and helps him produce a book of poems. The second, Rosa (Lola Dueñas), is a beleaguered single mother with two children, who visits Ramón after seeing him on television and falls in love. When she tries to convince him that his life is worth living, he caustically suggests that she is really seeking some meaning to her own life. Anyone who really loves him, he insists, will help him die. Will she or won't she? In the end, suspenseful narrative devices that worked so effectively in a gothic fantasy like ''The Others'' feel contrived when applied to what's supposed to be a true story of life, death and the living hell from which Ramón finally escapes.





BRANDS
The Economist

AT LAST weekend's consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas, digital convergence arrived with a vengeance. Among the avalanche of new products were lots of mobile phones. Those fitted with digital cameras and camcorders are hardly new, but they now take even better pictures. Others can be used to play three-dimensional video games, download movies, watch live TV (and record it during an incoming call), operate home-security systems and listen to music files downloaded from the internet. More marvels are on the way. In the midst of this frenzy of new and unfamiliar gizmos, product features would seem to count for everything. But companies in the hypercompetitive electronics industry are discovering something unexpected, and curious: brands matter almost as much as dazzling new technology.

One of the clearest demonstrations of this is South Korea's Samsung Electronics, which made a big splash this year in Las Vegas. Samsung was once best known for making things like cheap microwave ovens. In the past few years it has transformed itself into one of the “coolest” brands around, and is successfully selling stylish flat-screen TVs, digital cameras and mobile phones. After a record-breaking year, it is poised to overtake Motorola as the world's second-biggest maker of mobile phones. And it is snapping at the heels of Japan's Sony for leadership in the consumer-electronics business (see article).

This would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago. But Samsung has proved that a combination of clever brand-building and well-designed, innovative products can work miracles. In such a competitive market, a brand without good products will quickly fade. But the real surprise is that the opposite is also true. The market is crowded with firms with a few snazzy products, but weak brands. To thrive and grow on the scale Samsung has achieved requires a strong brand, as well as innovative products.

Years ago, when products did not change much and companies largely stuck to their knitting, American and European consumers faithfully bought cameras from Kodak, televisions from RCA and radios from Bush, because those brands represented a guarantee of quality. Then the Japanese got better at what they made. Now the South Koreans are doing the same. And yet with many American and European electronics companies making their gadgets in the same places, even sometimes the same factories, as their Asian competitors, the geography of production has become less important. Many consumers are now looking for a guide through a bewildering array of choices. A strong brand offers such guidance.

Apple bites: Moreover, digital convergence allows a company with a strong brand in one area to move more easily into another. Hence Sony invented portable music with the Walkman, but was slow to come up with a digital replacement. It lost its lead—not to another consumer-electronics maker, but to Apple, the Californian computer firm which has had a huge hit with its iPod. Now that the iPod has introduced the Apple brand to lots more people—including many who use PCs running Microsoft's Windows operating system—Apple has announced new low-cost versions of both its iPod and its Macintosh computers in an attempt to exploit its brand and reach further beyond its computing niche (see article).

In addition to the traditional promise of quality, a strong brand also offers consumers at least some hope that complex new products made by the same company will work together. Firms ignore this hope at their peril. This is one reason why Sony, Apple and Samsung have all opened “brand showrooms” where customers are encouraged to try out their wares. Although many shoppers now use the internet to make price and product comparisons, many still also want to touch the real thing before they part with their cash. In addition, the showrooms help people understand how these new products work. Some of them, you may have noticed, come with instruction books bigger than the product.

Indeed Philips, one of Europe's oldest electronics suppliers, is trying to regain market share lost to Asian rivals by re-branding itself around the idea of “sense and simplicity”, promising that everything it produces, from heart defibrillators to coffee machines, will be both highly advanced and very straightforward to use. That is a tall order. But if Philips can fulfil this promise, it could prove a winning branding strategy. And as Philips has already discovered to its cost, even when it comes to high-tech wizardry, brands still matter. Just ask Samsung.