The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

The story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is one of those occasional, jarring proofs that The Man Upstairs or whatever cosmic force you subscribe to can have you absolutely whenever he wants. One day Jean-Dominique is a charismatic editor of Elle magazine with some of the most beautiful women in the world at his call; the next he’s a vegetable: every body part having betrayed him with the exception of his eyes, and he loses one of those early on in a moment of surprising, forceful discomfort. The doctors tell Bauby that he’s suffered some sort of rare stroke and that he’ll be fixed up soon, but that vague, ominous “soon” becomes more and more elusive, and it’s soon clear to Bauby that this new organic tomb is to be his lot in life. The mysterious stroke, in perhaps its most perverse move, has spared Bauby’s mind. His hungers and his intelligence remain aggressively, stubbornly alive, never again to be quenched.

This is the true story that inspired Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoir of the same name by Bauby. Yes. Bauby wrote the book in the above condition, aided by some very dedicated nurses and aides who read the alphabet aloud to Bauby until he signaled the correct letter with a blink of his remaining eye. The letters added up to words, and the words added up to sentences which eventually yielded the source material that drives the film. This was Bauby’s one way out, a guided tour for others of the private Hell in which he spent the remainder of his life. The book (according to the movie) was received with rave reviews.

Except The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a tour through Hell. It begins that way. Schnabel, in one of the more stunning bits of tee-total directorial empathy I’ve ever seen, chains us to Bauby’s eye and, for the first thirty minutes or so, rarely cheats. We see what Bauby sees, and we don’t see what Bauby doesn’t see. We share his disorientation and misery: professionals flit in and out with various banal comforts, and fresh embarrassments. Women of staggering beauty pop up from both the deep well of Bauby’s memories and in the actual room, both equally unattainable. One of the beauties invents the method of communication in which Bauby will write his book, and he promptly tells her that he wants to die. She scolds him for his selfishness and storms out, only to re-emerge a little later to apologize.

Several moments later, Bauby has decided to abandon self-pity, and this is where the film shakes off its limited perspective, and becomes surprisingly erotic and romantic. The highest compliment I can pay Schnabel, and there are several compliments to be paid for his performance here, is that he’s made a film that isn’t overly beholden to taste. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a dead from the waist down disease of the week picture. The film is tender, intimate and refreshingly horny. The film doesn’t condescend to Bauby or to us; it takes his position and SEIZES it. There’s a moment, late in the film, where Bauby’s ex-wife takes him and their children to the beach, and she reads to him. Bauby notices her fleshy, beautiful legs hiding under the book and the dress. It’s a scene worthy of the casual reading room longing of a Rohmer picture.

It’s also a testament to Schnabel’s film, and Ronald Harwood’s script, that the newfound tragedy doesn’t immediately discount the fact that Bauby was, in his previous life, a bit of a self-absorbed, disreputable hound that had a habit of forgetting his family. Bauby left his wife for another woman, but the wife comes to see him anyway, still very clearly in love with him. The up to this moment absent lover calls late in the film, and the wife has to act as the go between. Bauby tells his wife to tell the lover that he waits for her to come every day. He may be paralyzed and he may long for her, but I, in that position, may have waited until my nurse returned to make that particular proclamation. The film is rich with showy, you are there technique, but this is the truly great scene in the movie, pulling you in four or five different directions at once, and still managing to be deliriously romantic.

I sometimes, as an American, resent the convenient Americans Are Boobs philosophy that seems to govern World Cinema thinking. But I must give the various other filmmaking countries one thing: the cliche that most America filmmakers don’t know shit about sex in film. Most of the great American filmmakers seem resigned to ignore the act altogether: think of the Coen Brothers, or Anderson, or Scorsese, or Spielberg, or most Soderbergh (though Out of Sight is still one of the most erotic American films of the past ten years, against admittedly little competition, and Soderbergh borrowed his best sex scene from a Brit.) Consider what The Diving Bell and the Butterfly could’ve been in many Americans’ hands: a respectful, asexual Triumph of the Human spirit movie. Very few things are less triumphant in the movies than a Triumph of the Human spirit movie. The Diving Bell acknowledges Bauby’s remarkable strength of spirit without softening him. Schnabel, once a photographer himself, understands that most great people are intensely in their own headspace: in other words, to be great you have to probably be a bit of an asshole.

We have Valentine’s Day coming up, and I, as a fervently single male under thirty, strongly recommend that you lucky people take your mates to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you’re new in the relationship, you’ll look cultured and worldy, and if you’re old in the relationship, the film will re-affirm the fact that you should devour one another as much, as passionately, and as often as humanly possible. How can you get any more life-affirming than that?

★★★½

Posted on February 11th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Drama |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.