Julian Schnabel has made three feature films: Basquiat, Before Night Falls and now The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. All are biographical, examining the lives of real people, and in each case the protagonist struggles with a condition of literal or metaphorical imprisonment.
Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French fashion magazine editor and the author of the international best seller on which The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based, suffered a stroke in his 40s that left him in a rare affliction called "locked-in syndrome." He retained vision and hearing, and his mind continued to function perfectly, but his body was almost completely paralyzed. He could not move or speak. In the film a friend, visiting him in the hospital in Berck reports the latest gossip from the cafes of Paris: "Have you heard? Jean-Dominique is a vegetable."
"What kind of vegetable?" Jean-Dominique wonders. Like his condition, the metaphor is cruel, but not altogether unredeemable. As we come to understand in the course of this fierce and lovely film, his existence is not that of a vegetable but rather of a garden, a hothouse of consciousness, memory and ecstatic imagination.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CMC
Jean-Dominique is played by Mathieu Amalric, a French actor whose twitching, antic physicality makes the character's immobility all the more painful. But The Diving Bell, true to its hero and its literary source, is neither morbid nor mawkish. Propped up in a wheelchair, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, he remains a sensualist, a bon vivant and a keen literary wit.
But never a saint. Before his stroke Jean-Dominique led a life of glamour, pleasure and self-indulgence, for which he never apologizes.
The phrase "triumph of the human spirit" hovers over The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, along with a swarm of other empty, uplifting cliches. But Schnabel and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, have other themes in mind: limitation, constraint, incarceration. But Schnabel is not content simply to state or to dramatize this idea. Rather, he demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty.
And yet he also shows astonishing formal control. The movie begins claustrophobically, as we see the blurry bustle of the hospital room from Jean-Dominique's hazy, panicked perspective. Faces loom suddenly and awkwardly into view, while his captive consciousness writhes in its cage, trying to make contact with the world outside.
After a while it does, with the help of a speech therapist who patiently teaches Jean-Dominique to turn his left eyelid into a means of communication. She sits beside him, reciting the alphabet and stopping when he blinks, piecing together words and sentences from his signals.
Later an amanuensis (Anne Consigny) takes her place, and together she and Jean-Dominique compose the compact, lyrical book that will become Schnabel's expansive, passionate film. Their attention also introduces both the patient and the audience to an intense, nonsexual intimacy that is itself a form of love.
And so, curiously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right. In his memoir Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.
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