Crying in films is a physical response which does not come in little bursts: like laughs, or cheers, or whoops, or gasps. It leaks out, or more commonly it is choked back. You might cough or clear your throat in a sad film in the same way as you might recross your legs in a sexy one. Crying in films happens gradually, then suddenly as the dam is breached, and may be a delayed reaction to an event that happened on screen some minutes before.

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In fact, this is not a subject on which critics, especially male critics, are reticent. There is sometimes almost a kind of inverted intellectual machismo in talking about what a great big wuss you are – always sobbing at some film which isn’t, say, a screen Hamlet or sombre social-realist work but a classic Disney heartwrencher or other more obviously populist entertainment, in which case you are possibly crying for your lost childhood. Films often give you permission to do this. The question of why cinema, unlike theatre, has never quite adopted tragedy as a formal genre is difficult. It has dramas and once had weepies: that is not quite the same thing.

After long, lower-lip-trembling thought about the many films that make me cry, I have gone for Julian Schnabel’s 2007 film The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, based on the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby – the glamorous magazine editor who suffered a catastrophic stroke, became almost entirely immobile but was able to communicate by blinking in a special alphabet-code. Bauby was played by Mathieu Amalric.

I don’t just choke up; I full-on cry – a sob as direct and contained as a sneeze. Even writing this makes me a bit wobbly. The big moment comes when Bauby’s ancient, formidable, difficult father cries himself for his son: he is played by Max von Sydow. It is unbearable, almost existentially shocking: a film version of Van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man. When we think of the circumstances in which we might cry, it could be for children a generation below or elderly parents or grandparents a generation above, or of course in moments of self-pity for ourselves. But the idea of an old man himself, on the verge of death, forced at the end of his life to bear the additional burden of grief for a middle-aged son who has been stricken in this unthinkable way – it is devastating.

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Of course, these effects are achieved also by the melancholy piano score, which jabs at the tear ducts reasonably obviously. There is another brutally sad moment when Bauby’s children come to visit him in hospital with his estranged partner, played by Emmanuelle Seigner. To cheer him up, they sing a little song they’ve rehearsed about a kangaroo escaping a zoo by jumping over the wall. If you’re not crying at the end of that, I can only conclude that you were refused entry into the SAS because you were too tough.

Crying during a film is a strange, narcotic experience. After doing so, I have often walked the streets in a strange, happy, but slightly unwholesome kind of delirium. Maybe sad films are the cinematic equivalent of absinthe.

