Stroke of Genius

Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is out of sight.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Dec 18, 2007

SEEN BETTER DAYS: Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) blinks out his memoir, letter by letter, to a stenographer (Anne Consigny). (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins with cinema's elemental act: the opening of an eye. Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) has suffered a stroke, and comes to in a seaside hospital to discover that his entire body has been paralyzed save for his left eye, although his mind is unaffected.

The slow fade-in that heralds his return to consciousness is a standard-issue device, but what follows is purely extraordinary. Julian Schnabel, who directed Diving Bell, stays with Bauby's point of view for an unbroken quarter-hour, and returns to it for long stretches thereafter. Unless we avert our eyes, we have no choice but to see the world as he sees it. The term for Bauby's condition is "locked-in syndrome," and we are locked in along with him.

From his bed, Jean-Do, as he is called, is attended by a phalanx of kind, patient and, not incidentally, beautiful caregivers, including Marie-Josée Croze and Olatz Lopez Garmendia. Acting as Jean-Do's eye, the camera drinks in their bodies, a flash of skin at the neck or a glimpse of stockinged thigh, demonstrating that his physical urges have not been muted by his fleshly paralysis.

Indeed, what is most striking about Diving Bell is how ferociously sensual it is, how Schnabel and his cameraman, Janusz Kaminski, bring every inch of the screen to life, infusing their images with a tactile vibrancy. For Jean-Do's point of view, the filmmakers rely on a device that allows the lens to move independently of the camera, so that when Jean-Do's "eye" darts around the room, you don't have the feeling of a heavy handheld camera being whipped from side to side. Since the lens is not fixed parallel to the film, Schnabel and Kaminski can also modify the focal plane within a shot, so that areas of focus and blurriness are constantly shifting, swimming around the frame with a liquid ease that fits perfectly with the aquatic metaphors of Bauby's memoir. Although Diving Bell's images are not classically "sharp," they are more vivid for their occasional fuzziness — a blessed rebuke to the fascistic clarity of hi-def.

After a horrific scene in which we watch Jean-Do's immobile right eye being sewn up from the inside, Schnabel reverse-cuts out of Jean-Do's brain and settles into a slightly more conventional rhythm. Flashing back to Jean-Do's life before the stroke, which resolves itself into a series of missed opportunities and forcible rebuffs. The chief editor of French Elle, Jean-Do is first seen surround by half-naked female models, prefiguring a portrait of a life that substitutes physical closeness for intimacy. In one tender encounter, Jean-Do gently shaves his ailing father (Max von Sydow) while they exchange banal conversation, their bodies expressing a love for each other that their mouths cannot speak.

Diving Bell grants us access to Jean-Do's thoughts as well as his sight, first through Amalric's voiceover and then through the words he blinks out, letter by letter, to a stalwart stenographer (Anne Consigny) who assembles them into the memoir on which the film is based. Laborious though the process may be, it never becomes tedious, no matter how many times we hear someone start reading through the alphabet waiting for the telltale flap of an eyelid. By the time the process is developed, we've already heard so much of Jean-Do's internal monologue that we know the fierceness of the personality struggling to express itself. His condition may force him to be more reflective, but it does not dull his caustic sense of humor. The first time he sees himself, reflected in a pane of glass as he is wheeled down a corridor, he thinks, "I look like I came out of a vat of formaldehyde."

Although it bears a passing resemblance to any number of generic stories of trial and uplift, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is sui generis. It is a chronicle of death that is robustly alive, never bowing to defeat but never hiding the truth of what it confronts. It is terrifying and exhilarating, morbid and vivacious, sardonic and sentimental. Like Jean-Do's existence, it is something of a miracle.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Directed by Julian Schnabel

A Miramax release

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