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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Directed by Julian Schnabel
Written by Ronald Harwood, based on the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Max von Sydow and Marie-Josée Croze
****
Stanley Kubrick said that books that were generally not considered cinematic often made the best films because they left the directors free to imagine. That's certainly the case with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel's strikingly original adaptation of the memoir (of the same name) by Jean-Dominique Bauby.
Schnabel's previous films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls, are biographies of artists finding their humanity in the midst of torment and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly continues this theme. Bauby, then the 43-year-old editor of French Elle, was paralyzed by a massive stroke in 1995. Left only with the ability to blink his left eyelid, he managed to signal the letters of the alphabet one at a time to an assistant, and wrote the book from a chronic care nursing home. The name for his condition – the English phrase is used by French neurologists as well – is “locked-in syndrome.”
By now, there is a kind of locked-in mini film genre, including My Left Foot and The Sea Inside, but extending that form to other medical dramas about a hero/victim patient can reduce you to a puddle of tears or a ball of resentment at its emotional manipulation.
Schnabel's approach is exactly the opposite of reductive. Working with Steven Spielberg's favourite cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, he employs an array of lenses, styles and lighting in a technical tour-de-force to convey not only the physical limitations, but also the wide range of Bauby's consciousness.
Written by Ronald Harwood ( The Pianist), and then translated into French, the movie is set in the grimness of Bauby's day-to-day life hospital life (shot in the real hospital where Bauby was confined). Immobile, breathing through a tube in his throat, Bauby feels like a deep-sea diver with no hope of surfacing. At the same time, the movie is about his imagination, the butterfly of the title, which travels freely across time and space, calling on his memory of sensations.
The film begins with Bauby's waking from a three-week coma following his “cerebrovascular accident” while driving with his son. Schnabel imagines the world as Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) saw it: watery, phantasmagoric flickering, then suddenly a series of faces, very close, talking to him. Every doctor or nurse who wants to speak to him has to place themselves close and in his field of vision.
The effect is a series of direct-to-camera addresses that feel almost like screen-tests. Claustrophobia begins to turn to panic: In one early, extraordinary moment, we see from the inside when Almaric's right eye must be sewed closed to avoid infection (layers of latex were sewn over the camera lens).
The close-ups are also intimate, and erotic instincts kick in. When the beautiful therapists (Marie-Josée Croze and Olatz Lopez Garmendia) lean in to gaze at him, Bauby asks himself, “Am I in heaven?” Later, he gazes longingly at the thighs of his former common-law wife and mother of his three children (Emmanuelle Seigner).
In the scenes before his stroke, Bauby is shown as high-flying celebrity editor, an egotist and sensualist (perhaps not unlike director Schnabel). The expressive Almaric, captures the energy and impatience of a man who is used to being in charge. When his world collapses, he at least retains his biting humour. Forty minutes of the film pass before the first time Bauby sees himself in his post-stroke state. His mouth sags to one side, his single working eye bulging. There's barely time to register the shock when he wisecracks, “I look like something in a jar of formaldehyde.”
Even the moments of sadness and wistfulness are complex. There's a scene in which Bauby gets a phone call from his girlfriend Ines, who professes her love but won't see him, saying she would prefer to remember him as he was. The combination punch of the scene is that the only person in the hospital room who can translate for him is the wife he dumped for this woman. There are two devastatingly understated scenes with Max von Sydow, as Bauby's 92-year-old father, mockingly complaining as his son shaves him. Later, after the stroke, the old man calls the hospital, trying to communicate with his mute son.
As Bauby's mind flies free and the body crumbles, Schnabel's images are grand and metaphoric (a glacier breaking off and falling into the sea). Other scenes show the playful echo of Fellini: Bauby imagines this same seaside hospital in the 19th century, when the Princess Eugenia, in blue hoop skirt, paraded among the tubercular children; or later, as a rehearsal space for the ballet dancer, Nijinsky, who is seen, his body painted as a faun, leaping and turning through the hallways.
Does Schnabel indulge himself? If so, it seems a fair tradeoff for the stringent point-of-view he initially imposes on the film. The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn't about feeling better about terrible things, but about cherishing imagination as the force that sustains life.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens tomorrow in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, and in other Canadian cities on Jan. 4.
