After an unusual opening credit sequence featuring X-ray
slides of bone and tissue pleasantly panning across the camera to a male French
singer, ?The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? unceremoniously drops the audience into
a hospital room in Berck, France. The audience is challenged to view the world through
the grainy and blurred vision of a man just regaining consciousness. Everything
around him is an oppressive shade of white, sea green and powder blue, and his
heavy breath is next to our ears. Ingratiating doctors gather around the man,
testing his basic faculties. Panicking, he realizes he cannot speak.
The man is Jean-Dominique Bauby, who has been in a coma for
three weeks and is afflicted with ?locked-in syndrome,? a rare condition in
which the patient is fully conscious of everything around him but almost
completely paralyzed. His only physical faculty is the control of his left eye.
Only by blinking can he communicate with the world around him.
Communication is a two-way street. On one hand, Bauby is
desperate for it. We hear Bauby?s near-constant interior monologue as he
engages in sometimes witty, sometimes sardonic one-sided repartee with the
doctors and hospital staff. Catching his reflection in a window, he glumly
thinks to himself, ?I look like I came out of a vat of formaldehyde.?
On the other hand, he resists any hope that his condition
might improve. He is soon introduced with approving musings to his speech
therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze), who has developed a system of
communication for him: She says each letter of the alphabet, arranged by their
frequency of use, and he blinks when she gets to the right one. Through this tedious
method he slowly forms words and sentences. When she tries to test out the
system, however, he is taken off guard and disheartened by how painstakingly
slow and difficult the process is and how he has nothing worth expressing. The
first phrase he spells out is, ?I want to die.?
Screenwriter Ronald Harwood (?The Pianist?) masterfully
adapted ?The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? from Bauby?s real-life memoir of
the same name, which took 200,000 blinks to write. It is director Julian
Schnabel?s preservation of such details that makes the film succeed in striking
a tone somewhere between pathos and ironic whimsy. When a fly lands on Bauby?s
nose, he can see it but can?t shake it off. He bemoans the boredom and precarious
selection of TV channels on Sundays, and as an imagined glacial shelf crashes
into the ocean he sinks further and further in his diving bell.
The cinematography functions beautifully as a reflection of Bauby?s
mental and physical state. As Bauby?s ability to communicate expands, the
camera pulls back by degrees, letting more of the world in. Through this
physical intimacy with the actors the audience is often lulled into forgetting
that the people on the screen are acting. It is director Julian Schnabel?s
previous experience as an artist that allows him to achieve such a profound
breakdown of artifice.
Bauby ? played by Mathieu Amalric (?Le Grand Appartement?) ?
is presented in a second-person view, his immobile body flopped over in a
wheelchair. His upper lip is fat and juts out; his single operative eye remains
wide open. He actually resembles Johnny Depp when most strung out in ?Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas.?
Bauby comments that ?imagination and memory? are the two
things that will keep him sane and alive. Appropriately, his flashbacks and
dreams are vibrantly filmed, often with long shots that revel in the depth,
distance and clarity that Bauby is now deprived of, and the difference is frequently
jarring. It is here that Amalric displays his full talent as an actor,
strutting through scenes with a confident air that the paralyzed Bauby can now
only dream of.Likewise, when the camera
returns to his comatose viewpoint near the end of the movie, the audience
uneasily senses his world shrinking inward again.
Near the end of the film a flashback finally allows us to
see the stroke that has caused the poor man so much agony. We are ourselves
struck by how utterly ordinary the day is; it is fair and cloudless, and while
driving down the road with one of his sons, tragedy strikes for no good reason.
Bauby?s account is a powerful reminder of how we must always cling to the
banal, ordinary things that make us human because they can be swept away
without a moment?s notice.
4 stars out of 5