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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon)

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: PG-13
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Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of Elle magazine, a journalist, an author, and a Parisian socialite. In 1995, when 43 years old, he was paralyzed by a stroke. All he could do was blink his left eye, grunt, and move his mouth a bit. He communicated to a therapist by blinking – spelling out one letter at a time. In this way, he dictated a memoir – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – and died days after its publication.

Julian Schnabel’s film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an adaptation of that memoir. It is a submersion into Bauby’s consciousness, into his absurd condition. Schnabel – an acclaimed neoexpressionist artist – traps us in Bauby’s cocoon and subjugates us to his struggle.

The story begins as Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is opening his eyes, waking from a three-week coma and seeing what has become of himself. Nurses, doctors and specialists tend to him with hopeful platitudes. He is assigned an earnest speech therapist – Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) – who is determined to get him talking again. Bauby’s estranged girlfriend and partner Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), some old friends and, eventually, his children come and visit him. As he dictates his memoirs, Bauby reconciles himself to the lush life he once had, and the impoverished one he still lives.

His imagination and creativity are all that remain. He flies away into fantasies, daydreams, and memories - into clouds of whimsy and recollection. With his amanuensis, Bauby gives birth to his ideas one letter at a time – a metamorphosis through which his mind frees itself into the world once more.

Schnabel subjectifies Bauby’s reality. The camera often shoots from the first-person. It jerks about, feeling stuck and helpless. It goes black when Bauby blinks. The editing and music jump and scenes fade in and out with the ambiguity of dreams. The photography is saturated in fantasy and memory, but washed out, almost sepia at times, in waking life. Schnabel also dwells on symbol, on the titular figures and their utter analogy to a crippled body and imprisoned mind.

Like Ramón Sampedro – the quadriplegic of The Sea Inside – Bauby finds himself in self-expression and in the infinity of words and thoughts. Yet it is only a consolation, a gesture from an existence that is often more dead than alive, that drowns him in a purgatory of reflection.

Schnabel’s film is this suffering, but also its glory as it surfaces and breathes the miracle of creativity.