Director: Julian Schnabel
Writers: Ronald Harwood, Jean-Dominique Bauby
Photography: Janusz Kaminski
Editor: Juliette Welfling
Cast: Mathieu Almaric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais, Niels Arestrup, Olatz López Garmendia, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Marina Hands, Max von Sydow, Isaach De Bankolé, Emma de Caunes
It's probably fair enough to characterize The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as a gimmick movie, certainly on its most basic conceptual levels, in thrall to its own approach to the problem of the story it has set itself to tell. That's typical of its director, Julian Schnabel. Yet it remains so unfailingly beautiful in its discipline to tell it, perhaps the only way it could—and it's such an amazing story to tell—that it succeeds in a way no other movie yet by arch stylist Schnabel has even approached.
It is almost gleeful in the way that it so deliberately turns preconceptions on their head, reveling, for example, in the steely will evinced by a Paris fashion plate, a kind of will that few of us could even come close to emulating, unspooling much of its story explicitly from the point of view of a man who can do little more than blink one eye, and engaging directly in the monotony of such a constricted life in order to uncover, piece by piece, the poignant fleeting richness of it. It's just remarkable.
Based on good old true events, and more specifically on the short memoir of the same title by former "Elle" editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, it focuses closely on the last 15 months of Bauby's life, after he had suffered a massive stroke and succumbed to a condition known as "locked-in syndrome." As the chilling name implies, locked-in syndrome occurs when physical paralysis is nearly complete even as intellectual and sensory capabilities remain engaged and functional. In Bauby's case, he was able to blink his left eye and that was about it.
As a former editor in a center of world culture, much of Bauby's life had been built around language and communication, which only deepens the horror of his predicament even as it also helps to explain the motivation he could draw on to reconnect with the world over those months that it took him to write his memoir.
As detailed economically here by Schnabel, a speech therapist concocted an elaborate scheme to communicate with him, based on a yes/no system of blinking and working with the alphabet rearranged by relative frequency of use for each letter, the more frequently used appearing first: thus (for English) E, T, A, O, I, N, S, and so on. The person working with Bauby would recite each letter and Bauby would blink for the letter he wanted. From such matter were words, sentences, and paragraphs constructed. One can only imagine the frustration involved.
In this way Bauby wrote his book, which is filled with beautiful language and passages, much of it featured in this film. All of the astonishing interiority of the picture also, of course, comes directly out of the memoir.
Music is featured all through this picture—the Dirtbombs, Ultra Orange, the Velvet Underground, others—but it also has extended periods of silence, silences that can be absolute, the kind experienced in a plunge underwater when all sound is cut off. Into this, in many ways, the chant of the alphabet as someone or other patiently embarks on the convoluted back and forth of communicating with Bauby works as a kind of musical element, a theme established and recurring.
As with any of us, the 43-year-old Bauby's life was a bit of a mess at the time of his stroke: a strained relationship with Celine, the mother of his children; a mistress incapable of even visiting him after he is hospitalized; a connection with his father (played marvelously by Max von Sydow) that is real yet tenuous and fraught with the usual problems between parents and grown children. There's never a good time in anyone's life for a massive stroke.
Flashbacks of his earlier life are included to flesh out some of these situations, but most of the movie is about Bauby's struggle to adapt to his new life. There's a powerful scene where Celine takes Bauby and their three children to the beach for Father's Day. The children seem accepting of their father's situation, unafraid of him, though vaguely troubled. They play and cavort, while Bauby sits in his wheelchair in the sand and tries to watch them as they move in and out of his limited field of vision. Tom Waits plays on the soundtrack. It's devastating in its simplicity and lack of histrionics.
Mathieu Almaric as Bauby is tremendous, managing more expressiveness than one would think possible out of a single eye, a nice contrast to the flashback appearances where he inhabits a fully functional body that we understand, in context, he couldn't possibly appreciate enough. Emmanuelle Seigner is also fine as Celine, frequently forced to play close to the camera, as so many of the present-day characters are, looming in and out of Bauby's life and his face for therapy or on visits. She is equally quiet and centered within a virtually impossible role.
In fact, for a gimmick movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is perhaps most remarkable for the degree of its quiet, centered confidence, for the sure-handed way it sets itself to the story and never makes too big a deal of anything. The terms of Bauby's condition are, of course, claustrophic as the reality of it sets in for us, as viewers, but by then Bauby has already made his decisions. He is never entirely at peace—how could anyone be? But he manages to operate as an unself-conscious, non-sanctimonious, and inspiring role model nearly every step of the way for human fallibility in confrontation with itself, for making do with what one has, and for embracing life whole, even in despair.
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