Memory helps man escape from his 'Diving Bell' body

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

January 11, 2008

(A+) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

The diving bell stands for the physical state of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby: A devastating stroke, at age 43, sends this smart, chic Parisian into "locked-in syndrome," which leaves thoughts and feelings intact within an inert body. Bauby can see and hear (though with increasing difficulty), but his sole means of expressing himself comes from blinking his left eyelid.

The butterfly refers to the powers of imagination and memory that enable him to escape his diving bell and soar through dreams and now-impossible experiences.

Bringing both the diving bell and the butterfly to the screen with equal force, director Julian Schnabel achieves a thrilling creative fusion of realism and lyricism. He honors the memory of Bauby (who died in 1997) by crafting a film that is furiously, visually alive. Far more than in his previous pictures about artists, Basquiat (1996) and Before Night Falls (2000), Schnabel fulfills Joseph Conrad's goal: "My task, above all, is to make you see."

Mathieu Amalric gives a mesmerist's performance as Bauby. He pitches Bauby's voice-over monologues to us as intimate conversations: He fills Schnabel's soundtrack with hard-fought wisdom and sensual appreciation. He's able to suggest feeling as well as control with Bauby's one eye. And in flashbacks he never oversells Bauby's sybaritic appetites or pleads for his character's depths. He's got a puckish world-weariness - especially when he wanders through Lourdes with a devout mistress - but he's also persuasive as a parent who understands the import of fatherly approval. Amalric's victory as an actor is to merge the healthy Bauby of the past with the heroic, bed-ridden Cyclops.

We watch rapt while his speech therapist, Henriette Durand (Marie-Josee Croze), remedies his silence with an alphabet organized around the popularity of letters (with frequently used letters coming first). As she recites this alphabet, he employs the blink of his left eye to settle on a letter and spell a word out a character at a time. (A double-blink indicates the end of a word, and rapid blinking a mistake.)

His friends and family adopt this system - sometimes to comic or pathetic effect - when they visit him at the Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer, on the French Channel coast. None prove more adept at it than a young editorial assistant, Claude Mendibil (Anne Consigny), who takes the dictation that becomes his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The exquisite finished book testifies to the potency of language and literary transport; the extremely faithful movie does that, too. But the film succeeds because it translates the book into a salute to the power of sight. Even before a surgeon sews Bauby's right eye shut, this movie opens your eyes wide. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski put themselves into Bauby's diving bell and for roughly the opening half-hour depict only what he sees, and as he sees it. They use shifting focus and depth of field and fluid, asymmetrical compositions to zero in on anything that captures Bauby's focus moment by moment.

The movie reminds us that any individual's vision is a partial vision, limited but also made glorious by a singular point of view. The vital and original imagery of this movie adds an urgency and hunger to Bauby's exquisite reminiscence. Even when he's frustrated or tearful, the camera evokes his hunger for communication and experience, his need to drink in what's before him and make sense of it, all through a single working eye.

Ronald Harwood's astute, empathic adaptation doesn't stint on Bauby's fears and self-pity, especially when the hero realizes no one else can hear the voice in his own head. But almost immediately you get a sense of Bauby's mental toughness and, increasingly, his observant humor, especially when he repeatedly twits (at least in his mind) a neurologist who insists on making every pronouncement twice (such as "progress, progress").

The filmmakers triumph because they convey Bauby's sporting personality and sensibility rather than coast on the pathos of his plight or the uniqueness of his creative endeavor. When he finally catches a glimpse of his own reflection - his hair plastered down, one eye open behind glasses, his lower lip swollen and misshapen - his statement that he looks like he emerged from "a vat of formaldehyde" carries both a sting and its own salve. You know enough about his vanity to understand how much it wounds him, but you also know that his wit is thriving.

We gradually learn about his womanizing and his estrangement from Celine (Emmanuelle Seignier), the mother of his children. In one sublime flashback he shaves his 92-year-old father, Papinou (Max Von Sydow), who scolds him for never marrying Celine because their arrangement made it easy for him to leave her. "Having a mistress is no excuse for leaving the mother of your children," decrees Papinou; "the world has lost its values." Von Sydow pours everything he knows about acting into his brief screen-time - he depicts Bauby's dad with a blunt paternal force that's suffused with warmth.

The whole ensemble has a mesmerizing fullness to it. Seignier acts without a whiff of self-pity as Celine; in one dazzling scene, she sits at Bauby's bedside when his mistress calls. Seignier is phenomenal at suggesting the hurt, rage, jealousy and love that riddle her composure as she strives to be forceful and civilized.

But the force of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly emanates from the way Schnabel and the actors move unpredictably yet in sync. Rather than grow repetitive, even the successive readings of the alphabet become a rhythmic verbal music with a heightened dramatic edge. And the blinks of Bauby's eye are not just clicks of assent or the equivalent of tappings on a keyboard, but visual gasps or pauses for thought.

This film is far closer to the movies of John Huston than There Will Be Blood. Huston once explained his aesthetic by comparing motion picture techniques to "physiological and psychological processes." He wrote, "It is almost as if there were a reel of film behind our eyes. ... As though our very thoughts were projected onto the screen." He advised, "Look from one object to another across the room. Notice how you involuntarily blink. That's a cut."

In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel takes this visceral aesthetic to new heights of refinement - and makes it all limpid and emotional. You don't want to blink: You won't want to miss a second of it.

>>>The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax) Starring Mathieu Amalric. Directed by Julian Schnabel. French with English subtitles. Rated PG-13. Time 112 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com