Moving without
moving

>> The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells
the remarkable story of paralyzed
writer Jean-Dominique Bauby

by MARK SLUTSKY

A writer and editor at Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby was crippled by a stroke at the age of 43. To his horror, Bauby woke up after the incident to find he was suffering from a condition known as “Locked-in syndrome,” a barely-imaginable nightmare existence in which his mind was fully active but his body, save for one eyelid, was almost completely unresponsive.

Amazingly, and with much help, Bauby was eventually able to communicate. A patient therapist would hold up a list of letters, sorted in order of how commonly they were used in French, and read through them one by one. Bauby would blink once when she went over the letter he wanted to use, and in that way he could construct whole sentences, and eventually, a book about his experience, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a remarkable and beautifully written testament to human existence that would be published only 10 days before Bauby’s death.

Told from the point of view of a paralyzed man in a hospital bed, the book seemed like the very definition of unfilmable. But painter-cum-director Julian Schnabel has pulled off something astonishing with his film adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It’s an incredibly moving and artful film that defies the story’s limitations to create a movie that stands alone.

Bauby is played by Mathieu Amalric, but most of the film is shown from his point-of-view, a use of cinematic first-person more or less unheard of since Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Lady in the Lake. We do see Amalric in the hospital bed, and he’s especially present in the film’s flashback sequences, but we are otherwise almost entirely aligned with Bauby.

Somehow, though, the film never feels static. It’s almost too obvious to point this out, but Schnabel brings a painter’s sense of composition and colour to the film’s images, and it’s never less than beautiful to watch. Amalric and the rest of the cast, which includes Max von Sydow as Bauby’s aged father and Quebec’s own Marie-Josée Croze (in an angelic role as Bauby’s therapist) are convincing and human. This is a beautiful and touching film and a truly impressive accomplishment. Highly recommended.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
opens Tuesday, Dec. 25

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