The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Release Date: November 30, 2007 Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Marina Hands, Isaach de Bankole, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Max von Sydow Directed by: Julian Schnabel
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly manages to be an exemplary film about the so-called triumph of the human spirit by largely upending every cliché the usual cinematic treatment of the triumph of the human spirit indulges. Based on both a true-life story and an extraordinary memoir — I note this because the film takes up after the book leaves off, revealing the final chapter of its writer-protagonist's life — the film glories in the fact that said triumph is completely imaginary.
Bear with me. The film takes its name from the memoir of Jean-Dominique ("Jean-Do" to his friends) Bauby; the title's "diving bell" refers to his physical condition, while the "butterfly" is but one of the things he can still conjure. In December 1995, Bauby, then the 43-year-old editor of the French edition of Elle magazine and quite the man-about-Paris, suffered a freak cerebro-vascular accident (what used to be called a massive stroke). He went into a three-month coma; he awoke in something called "locked-in syndrome." Bauby could hear, and see, and think… but he could not move. Not his hand to gesture, not his lips, tongue, or throat to speak (or eat, for that matter). The only thing he could do, physically, was blink. And only one eyelid, at that; his left one.
The astonishingly determined Bauby, with the help of a speech therapist, learned a code by which he could communicate. The method was simple, and arduous; the alphabet, reordered so that the letters followed in descending frequency of use, was recited to Bauby; he blinked when the reciter got to the correct letter. Bauby, who, at the time he was struck, had a book contract (a project on which he was — typically for his fully-abled self, as it turns out — procrastinating), abandoned his original project and began his memoir. The memoir's tone — the ironic and frequently enraged contemplation of the disabled self — is captured with uncanny precision throughout Schnabel's marvelous movie, which he shot from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). Bauby's contemplation of himself as a "legume" is at once a coping mechanism, a raison d'etre, and a potential road back (as a heartbreaking breakthrough in Bauby's condition near the end of the picture indicates).
The film begins from Bauby's POV just after he awakes, and stays there for an almost impossible length of time. This subjective camera is not as irritatingly vertigo-inducing as Robert Montgomery's in Lady in the Lake — but it is in fact more uncomfortable, largely due to the emotional temperature. Schnabel, with the considerable aid of inspired cinematographer Jannusz Kaminski, puts you inside Bauby's head, makes you feel his helplessness and frustration as well as anybody who's not actually feeling it can. It's terrifying, really; I don't know that there's ever been a more palpable cinematic depiction of the body betraying the self. The movie "opens up" as Bauby, an extraordinary portrayal by Amalric, develops his way of communicating. With remarkable deftness, Schnabel intersperses flashbacks and fantasias (all beautifully conceived and shot) with Bauby's "progress." A scene of the immobilized Bauby on an outing to the beach, seeing his children for the first time since his transformation, twisted up in his wheelchair, is a wrenching sonata of loss.
But Bauby's story is not that of a saint. The man's life was interrupted at a particularly fraught time, when he was leaving the mother of his children for another woman. Bauby's one-time partner Celine, beautifully and self-effacingly played by Seigner, demonstrates considerable devotion by returning to his side to tend to him. But Bauby's incapable of returning the affection and frankly doesn't understand why some might think he's obliged to. There's a harrowing scene in which Bauby receives a call from his girlfriend Ines. She's clearly a vain, self-absorbed coward (she's been too, well, chickenshit, to visit him in the hospital at all), but Bauby nonetheless obsessively adores her. The call comes while Celine is the only person in the vicinity who can "translate" him for the other woman. Among other things, the scene definitively proves that Bauby was, as they say, no good at being noble. All he could be was him.
The story is all the more convincing for that, though, and all the more admirable for never trying to milk the viewers' tear ducts in traditional ways. It's also worth noting that every performer in the international cast — Seigner, de Bankole, von Sydow (magnificent as Bauby's father), and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel to name but a few — completely disappears into each of their roles, which I think is as much a testament to Schnabel's talents as to theirs.
READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
VIEW PHOTOS: Toronto portraits
