Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (5/5)

One of the few genuine masterpieces of the new century’s cinema

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(Julian Schnabel):
Mathieu Almaric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais.
Running time: 114 minutes.

There is a cliché, trotted out time and again by lazy writers, that certain works are “a triumph of the human spirit”. The phrase is so exhausted it tends to slink off the page for a snooze. Until now. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a film that has the power, not just to reinvigorate a cliché, but transform the way you feel about your own life. It has a spiritual charge that pulses through you, transporting you to the kind of height that leaves you clear-minded and clear-sighted. It left me profoundly sad for the film’s subject (more than once I found myself blubbering into a hankie) but exhilarated and appreciative for my own ordinary life. Schnabel, an artist and a filmmaker who directed Basquiat in 1996 and Before Night Falls in 2000, has achieved here the highest level of cinematic art. It is one of the few genuine masterpieces of the new century’s cinema.
This is the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the high-flying 43-year-old Parisian Elle editor, who was wrenched in one afternoon from his charmed existence. He had a massive stroke, leaving him with “locked-in” syndrome – a condition where his mind was untouched, but his entire body, including his speech, was paralysed. Bauby could only communicate by blinking an eye. That didn’t stop him writing a book with the help of an assistant. She reworked the alphabet into the most frequently-used letters, and recited them to him, one letter at a time. Two-hundred thousand blinks later, Bauby had a book – memorised line-by-line in his mind. It was a stirring, profound reflection on his own life. Two days after it was published Bauby died.
The film opens in a haze, as Bauby (Mathieu Almaric) wakes from a coma. The screen comes slowly to light, the world taking shape through blur. Doctors loom in and out of focus. A decision is made to sew an eye up but they can’t hear his protests. We see the needle prick the flesh, as if the camera was located behind an eyelid. And then Bauby is left with one eye. “This is life?” he asks himself, helpless and distraught. We are trapped in his claustrophobia.
At first, the film weighs down on you, like the diving bell of the title, sinking with immobility and fear. But there are other things that aren’t paralysed: his imagination; his memory. And these take flight with stunning dexterity. The film soars like a butterfly, alighting upon his past where he discovers profound sorrow for things not done (“I treated her so badly and the kids. I can never make amends. Never,” he says of the mother of his children). And it travels on the winds of untrammelled imagination. He conjures an imaginary seafood dinner, a lustful encounter, the sound of wind flapping skirts on a beach. There are moments of quiet joy (a football game on the TV) and black humour: a nurse arranges a speakerphone for Bauby so he can listen to wellwishers. But all the phone-man can see is a bed-bound vegetable. “Maybe he’s a heavy breather,” he says.
He relives his last encounter with his housebound elderly father Papinou (played with great pathos by the wonderful Max Von Sydow). He gives his dad a shave, who offers in exchange, frank commentary about his son’s amorous life. The moment resonates deeply: Bauby will not grow old to see his own children.
Just as before the stroke, Bauby is surrounded by women. There are his therapists Betty (Anne Alvaro), Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) who beam relentless encouragement at his slumpen face, and he beams back a beady eye at their cleavage, proving that even in paralysis, some things just don’t leave the body. There’s his writing assistant Claude (Anne Consigny); and his former partner Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), whom he had left for another woman, but who still returns week-after-week with the children. This makes for one of the most bizarre moments of ménage à trois in a French film (and that takes some beating) as she painfully translates his winks down the phone to his former young lover.
What is astonishing here is how screenwriter Ronald Harwood has extracted this from such an internalised work. He has stayed true to its form, while Schnabel skilfully choreographs Bauby’s intense subjective experience, his dreams and his past, into a dextrous dance that celebrates not just his life, but all life. There is a scene when, driving through Paris, the camera films at oblique angles in a car, as if seeing old things anew. This is what the Diving Bell and the Butterfly does too for the viewer, lifting us up above our own lives for a new perspective. I found it breathtakingly sad, unsentimental and uplifting.