The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Some films, like Juno, are script-driven, and others, like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, are director-driven. This is not to suggest that the director of Juno and the screenwriter of Diving Bell are not important and did not do good work, but after watching these films it's easy to see where the impetus for the creation comes from. With Juno it's the words, and with Diving Bell it's the images.

This is not an outlandish notion considering the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is Julian Schnabel, who for much of his professional life has been best known as a painter. This film is full of painterly images--a kind of poem of images. Although the dialogue by Ronald Harwood is quite good, this film's raison d'etre is the story told by the images, some quite brilliant and moving.

The film is adapted from a book by Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was the director of the French Elle. He suffered a stroke and became victim to a condition known as locked-in syndrome, in which he could not move any muscles in his body except his left eyelid. In this way he was able to communicate with others, through repetition of letters of the alphabet. Remarkably, he was able to dictate an entire memoir. I haven't read this book, but I would imagine it doesn't immediately suggest a film treatment, since internal monologues are very difficult to adapt. That Schnabel was able to visualize a way to interpret this story via the image is a testament to his painter's eye.

For much of the film we see things as Bauby sees them, and we hear the thoughts in his head. When he awakes from a coma the images, as he saw them, are blurred and confused, and are more unsettling that anything in Cloverfield. There is a particularly teeth-cringing moment when his bad eye is shown shut. The entire film is not from this vantage point, however (much to my relief) but we are always hearing his thoughts, as he is telling the story. He even keeps his sense of humor, guffawing internally at a politically incorrect joke by a telephone installer.

Bauby is played by Mathieu Amalric, an impish actor last seen by me as a fixer of some sort in Munich. He has an interesting challenge, as through most of the film he is immobile except for that one eyelid. He is allowed to move about in flashbacks, though, including a memorably funny one when he accompanies a model on a romantic weekend to Lourdes, but when the girl turns out to have a Madonna-fixation the romance is quelled.

There are other excellent players surrounding Amalric. Marie-Josee Croze, also from Munich (as an assassin) plays Bauby's speech therapist, who works with on the alphabet-system. She has a great moment when she translates Bauby's first sentence, which is "I want death." She snaps at him anger, and then realizes she has no business judging him. Emmanuelle Seignier, as the mother of Bauby's children, is also quite good, especially in a scene in which she has to help translate an exchange between Bauby and his current mistress. Finally, the great Max Von Sydow has two short but riveting scenes as Bauby's father.

Schnabel avoids turning this into a Lifetime cable-TV weepie about the disease of the week. This is a good thing, artistically, but through much of the film I felt a little distance from the events. This film works well on an intellectual basis, less so on a emotional one. The film engaged my mind, but didn't particularly tug on my heartstrings. Still, it ranks as one of the best films (along with My Left Foot) about personal courage in the face of debilitating illness.