Text size:

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

November 30, 2007

Movies are meant to move. But a new level of restlessness has been lately overtaking the medium. Marathons such as "The Bourne Ultimatum" and "The Kingdom" are movies as aeronautic training tests, the cinematic equivalents of riding inside the rotating barrel of an accelerating cement-mixer truck that is hell-bent on breaking the sound barrier.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" arrests us for two hours, reminding us just how superfluous all this buzzing-about can become, in life as in movies. It depicts a man who can't move at all, but for one eye. What that eye is able to take in, however, and what it is able to refract, carries us to a place of transcendence that no hurtling hardware or pyrotechnics could approach.

The true-life protagonist of Julian Schnabel's magnificent drama is Jean-Dominique Bauby (a trenchant and ineffable Mathieu Almaric), an editor of French Elle whose fast-lane life is rudely halted by a "cardiovascular accident" that leaves him helplessly flat on his back in a seaside hospital. His rare condition, known as locked-in syndrome, shuts off just about everything but his mind, libido and ever-roving left eye.

The doctor on his case takes full advantage of what's functioning, assigning two angelically beautiful therapists to motivate a skeptical Bauby into learning how to communicate by blinking, once for yes and twice for no. This laborious system requires his conversation partner to spell out his words through a repetition of the alphabet, which has been pragmatically reordered with the most used letters first.

In such a manner, Bauby wrote the bestselling memoir that served as the basis for Schnabel's film.

Screenwriter Ronald Harwood invests his masterful adaptation with a liberating sarcasm that frees us to laugh mordantly along with its tragically compromised protagonist. The film's daring first half hour puts us literally inside Bauby's head looking out, a suffocating but necessary point of view that makes us complicitous with his feelings of self-doubt, exasperation and, most poignantly, desire. Bauby yearns for a girlfriend who guiltily refuses to visit him in the hospital (Agathe de La Fontaine), while negotiating the emotionally fraught ministrations of the mother of his children, Celine (the exceptional Emmanuelle Seigneur). In one of the film's many reverberant scenes, Celine bottles a wellspring of anguish as she serves as interlocutor for an emotionally charged phone exchange between her husband and his absent lover.

It is Bauby's relationship with his father (portrayed with heartbreaking beauty by Max Von Sydow), that conveys the film's most resonant thematic core of mortality and familial yearning. A flashback scene shows a once-vibrant Bauby shaving his father; the amplified sound of the razor scratching across Sydow's neck creates an almost unbearable awareness of the aging man's vulnerability. In a telling juxtaposition, we are then shown the wheelchair-bound Bauby being nurtured by his own children, a piercing reminder of how abruptly and unceremoniously the tables can turn.

Bauby's triumph rested in how he was able to harness his mind's eye to process his life's journey and then use his working eye to transmit his hard-earned wisdom to the page. Schnabel's triumph is in using his artist's eye to suggest the visual freedom of a man who can't budge. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" soars with marvelously expressive shots of half-glimpsed bodies and landscapes that compel us to see the mundane in fresh and uncharted ways. And isn't that, at the end of the day, what art is all about?

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (R). The world as seen through the left eye of a man suddenly stricken with locked-in syndrome, from the true-life memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The visual lyricism and irascible humor of Julian Schnabel's screen adaptation make for a life-against-the-odds drama like none you've ever seen. 1:52 (nudity, sexual content and some language). In French with English subtitles. At the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza, Manhattan. Opens Dec. 21 at Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington.