Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly review

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Justin McGuire reviews 2007 French film Le Scaphandre et le papillon that won best director's award at Cannes last year and has been nominated for 4 Oscars this year

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" begins by putting us straight into the head of the immobile Jean-Dominique Bauby. The movie opens and Bauby open his (and our) eyes. He can barely see, or even focus. He can't move, and although he keeps talking to the hovering doctors, they can't hear him. Soon he learns that he's had a stroke and is almost wholly paralyzed."The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" initially limits itself to first-person POV, using a very shallow and roving focus, making us nearly as confused as Bauby is. He narrates the movie for us as a voice in his head. Mathieu Amalric plays our disabled point-of-view, affectionately called Jean-Do by his friends and family. Amalric is immobile for most of the film, acting largely with just the motions of his left eye, but through flashbacks we are afforded glimpses into his pre-stoke lifestyle as a hedonistic and fully mobile fashion editor for Elle. They keep the narrative grounded by never letting Jean-Do become a more-than-human character. When he is first groggily leaving his coma, and is lying immobilized in bed, and sees two beautiful, blond, female doctors hovering over him, he (and I) can only think of one thing, and the camera follows his thoughts appropriately.The story progresses straightforwardly from here, from the moment he wakes up in the hospital to his end soon after the book gets published. It is punctuated with flashbacks and memories of Jean-Do's life, both real and imaginary.Marie-Josée Croze plays Henriette, his speech therapist, one of the two beauties Jean-Do originally sees when he wakes up. Henriette begins with a fascination for her unique patient, but that slowly turns to a form of love called devotion. She teaches him to communicate using the one instrument left to him, his left eye. She reads off letters of the alphabet, and he blinks when she says the letter he wants. A laborious process.Emmanuelle Seigner is Céline, his former girlfriend and mother of his kids. We eventually learn that Jean-Do left her for another woman, one whom we never see, and hear speak but once in one tragic scene where he has Céline communicate his continued love for this woman that he left her for. In short, Jean-Do is still, in some ways, callous. And again, wonderfully human.In the third act we finally see Jean-Do narrating the beginning of his book, "through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day," a passage that was translated perfectly in the opening scenes of this very movie.We know the book deviates from the movie in one important aspect, we see the book published, and hear of the first laudatory reviews. The movie concludes with a flashback to the stroke that immediately preceded the film. The touching ending comes a few scenes after that.

One part of the film that director Julian Schnabel was certainly not aiming for is the affect the subtitles had on the cinematography. The film is very unfocused and floating, representing how Jean-Do looks at the world, both through his one good eye and his imagination. The subtitles anchored the floating camera and giving us a stable port to rest our eyes on. Normally subtitles aren't thought of as part of the cinematic art, but here they dramatically alter the film, and although it may not be intentional, I can't say it's for the worse.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is absolute gorgeous. There are few other words for it. Emotionally, I cannot call it heartbreaking, because it is about a man who achieves what he sets out to achieve, and there is nothing tragic in that. Jean-Do's immobile life is a stunning success, and although it ended early, it ended on a note of deserved beatitude.

[rating:5]