"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

This imaginative, sensual picture is keyed to the indescribable essence of life: It's what movies, at their best, can be.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) and Claude (Anne Consigny)

Nov. 30, 2007 | Anyone who has read Jean-Dominique Bauby's slim, extraordinary 1997 memoir "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is likely to wonder how it could possibly be made into a movie. In 1995 Bauby, then 43 and the editor of French Elle, suffered a stroke that left him incapable of speaking and barely able to move, the victim of a rare condition known as locked-in syndrome. The one part of his body he could control was his left eyelid, and so Bauby learned to communicate by blinking. He wrote the book by working with an assistant, who would slowly recite a special alphabet; Bauby would blink to select the letters he wanted. In this way, letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, Bauby built "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" -- to say "wrote" seems barely adequate, considering the mental discipline and physical effort the book must have cost him. Bauby died just two days after the book's publication in France, but what he left behind is a small wonder of architecture, an intimate structure in which the reader and the narrator find a private, shared space with windows that open out onto the vastness of the world. It's the very opposite of locked-in.

So how do you make a movie about a man who can communicate only by fluttering his one functional eyelid? The painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel has given us two previous pictures, both of them also based on true stories of men who are no longer with us, the 1996 "Basquiat," about '80s wunderkind painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the 2004 "Before Night Falls," based on the memoir of the Cuban poet and novelist Reynaldo Arenas. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" -- which was made in France, with a cast of French actors -- is only Schnabel's third movie, but it's hard to imagine that any other, more experienced director could have done it better. The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.

Mathieu Amalric plays Bauby, or Jean-Do, as his friends and family call him. As the movie opens, he has no idea what's going on, and neither do we: We see portions of blurry human figures, from oblique angles, incomplete portions of something so incomprehensible we can't even call it a puzzle. We hear a voice asking, "What's going on?" It's Jean-Do's voice, but it may as well be coming from us. In these early scenes, shot from a point of view that's baffling both to the audience and to the narrator, Jean-Do is us, and we are his John Doe -- not just witnesses to his journey but anonymous accomplices traveling with him.

A voice -- we'll later see that it belongs to an officious doctor -- asks, "Do you remember what happened?" Jean-Do answers, "Like I said, vaguely -- images," but the words are forming only in his head. He asks, "What's going on?" and gets no answer. He blinks, and the camera blinks with him.

What's strange and wonderful about this opening is that although it could have been made to feel like a nightmare, it's something far more delicate -- Schnabel, screenwriter Ronald Harwood and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski keep us floating on a cushion of incomprehensibility. Later, we learn exactly what happened to Jean-Do, but what happened to him is far less important than who he is -- or even than who he was. In flashback sequences we see the old Jean-Do, an energetic wood sprite in a middle-aged guy's body, supervising a fashion shoot (Azzedine Alaïa and Lenny Kravitz show up, playing themselves); collecting one of his three kids for a visit, in a snazzy new sports car and dealing with the indifferent resignation of his estranged partner, Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner); joking with and teasing his elderly father (played, in a performance as close to perfect as any human could get, by Max von Sydow) as he gives him a shave; driving to Lourdes for a not-so-dirty weekend with a girlfriend, Joséphine (Marina Hands). (Schnabel and Kaminiski open that last sequence with a dazzling shot of Joséphine's sandy-blond hair, seen from behind, blowing in the wind as the two drive along in their convertible. The strands of hair fan out and flutter wildly, like tentacles, alive in every way.)

Next page: "The camera becomes the man"