photoed at Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Island, HK(8th, Feb., 2008)

watched at Apgujeong cgv, Seoul(16th, Feb., 2008)

Marie-Josée Croze as Henriette in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

Body Unwilling, a Mind Takes Flight

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 30, 2007

Julian Schnabel has made three feature films: “Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls” and now “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” All are biographical, examining the lives of real people, and in each case the protagonist struggles with a condition of literal or metaphorical imprisonment. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mr. Schnabel’s younger colleague in the New York art scene of the 1980s, is trapped by addiction and by his outsider status. Reinaldo Arenas, the gay Cuban poet whose memoir was the basis of “Before Night Falls,” is censored, harassed and locked up by successive dictatorships.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French fashion magazine editor and the author of the international best seller on which “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is based, suffered an even more extreme form of confinement. In his early 40s, he suffered a stroke that left him in a rare affliction called “locked-in syndrome.” He retained vision and hearing, and his mind continued to function perfectly, but his body was almost completely paralyzed. He could not move or speak. In the film a friend, visiting him in the hospital in Berck, a wind-swept seaside town in northern France, reports the latest gossip from the cafes of Paris: “Have you heard? Jean-Dominique is a vegetable.”

“What kind of vegetable?” Jean-Dominique wonders. “A carrot? A pickle?” Like his condition, the metaphor is cruel, but not altogether unredeemable. As we come to understand in the course of this fierce and lovely film, his existence is not that of a vegetable but rather of a garden, a hothouse of consciousness, memory and ecstatic imagination.

Jean-Dominique is played by Mathieu Amalric, a French actor whose twitching, antic physicality makes the character’s immobility all the more painful. But “The Diving Bell,” true to its hero and its literary source, is neither morbid nor mawkish. Propped up in a wheelchair, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye (the other, in one especially nightmarish scene, has been sewn shut to prevent infection), he remains a sensualist, a bon vivant and a keen literary wit.

But never a saint. Before his stroke Jean-Dominique led a life of glamour, pleasure and self-indulgence, for which he never apologizes. He had recently left Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), his longtime partner and the mother of his three children, an abandonment that seemed to follow a series of betrayals. Celine appears, nonetheless, at the hospital in Berck, fighting back tears and demonstrating a loyalty that comes close to masochism. In spite of his lapses, she clearly loves Jean-Dominique, and she is not alone. Besides other women (Marina Hands, most memorably), there are acquaintances, colleagues (notably Isaach de Bankole) and Jean-Dominique’s father, a rogue of the old school played with magnificent poignancy by Max von Sydow.

The phrase “triumph of the human spirit” hovers over “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” along with a swarm of other empty, uplifting cliches. But Mr. Schnabel and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, have other themes in mind. Limitation, constraint, incarceration — these may be, as I’ve suggested, the shared premises of Mr. Schnabel’s films (and also of some of Mr. Harwood’s work, notably his script for “The Pianist”).

Their common subject, however, is freedom, the self-willed liberation of a difficult, defiant individual. But Mr. Schnabel is not content simply to state or to dramatize this idea. Rather, he demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty.

And yet he also shows astonishing formal control. The movie begins claustrophobically, as we see the blurry bustle of the hospital room from Jean-Dominique’s hazy, panicked perspective. Faces loom suddenly and awkwardly into view, while his captive consciousness writhes in its cage, trying to make contact with the world outside.

After a while it does, with the help of a speech therapist (the marvelously sensitive Marie-Josee Croze) who patiently teaches Jean-Dominique to turn his left eyelid into a means of communication. She sits beside him, reciting the alphabet and stopping when he blinks, piecing together words and sentences from his signals.

Later an amanuensis (Anne Consigny) takes her place, and together she and Jean-Dominique compose the compact, lyrical book that will become Mr. Schnabel’s expansive, passionate film. Their attention also introduces both the patient and the audience to an intense, nonsexual intimacy that is itself a form of love.

As Jean-Dominique’s eloquence takes flight, so does Mr. Schnabel’s. Condemned to live in an eternal present, Jean-Dominique is also freed from the tyranny of time, and so the film ranges freely into fantasy, speculation and remembrance, given shape not by a plot but by the ecstatic logic of images and associations. Working with the brilliant cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he uses light and color to convey the world of sensations from which Jean-Dominique is exiled, but which he appreciated all the more acutely for that reason.

And so, curiously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right. In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.

Before the stroke: Jean-Dominique Bauby at a magazine photo shoot in a scene from “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

December 21, 2007

By Roger Ebert

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a film about a man who experiences the catastrophe I most feared during my recent surgeries: "locked-in syndrome," where he is alive and conscious but unable to communicate with the world. My dread, I think, began when I was a boy first reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial" at an age much too young to contemplate such a possibility. At least the man in the film can see and hear; the hero of Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" is completely locked inside his mind.

The film is based on a real man, and the book he astonishingly succeeded in writing although he could blink only his left eye. The man was Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who was the editor of Elle, the French fashion magazine, when he had his paralyzing stroke. A speech therapist (Marie-Josee Croze) suggests a system of communication: They will arrange the alphabet in the order of most frequently used letters, and he will choose a letter by blinking. By this method, word by word, blink by blink, he dictated his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, published in 1997, shortly before he died.

It was a superhuman feat, but how could it be filmed? The director is the artist Julian Schnabel, who has made two previous films about artists creating in the face of determined obstacles; "Basquiat" (1996), about a New York graffiti artist, and "Before Night Falls" (2000), about the persecuted Cuban poet Reynaldo Arenas. His solution, arrived at with screenwriter Ronald Harwood, is not to show merely the man in the bed but to show what he sees, and those around him, and his memories and fantasies. This is not an easy way out, because everything in the film is resolutely filtered through the consciousness of the locked-in man.

The result is not what you could call inspirational, because none of us would think to be in such a situation and needing inspiration. It is more than that. It is heroic. Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve. And also with lust, hunger, humor and all of the other notes that this man once played so easily. We see flashbacks to his children, to his mistress, to his fantasies. We see those around him now. And in a gravely significant scene, we see him meeting with his old father (Max von Sydow), who, Andrew Sarris notes, "gets off what may be the single most French line of all time," which is, "Having a mistress is no excuse for leaving the mother of your children; the world has lost its values."

Celine, the mother of his children and his former partner (played by Emmanuelle Seigner), remains loyal to him and even helps him communicate with another woman who also is a former lover (the male libido is indomitable). And all of the other women around him, including his nurse, his assistant and a fantasy lover, are loving and patient and assure him that he is in some way the same vital man, filled with eagerness, lust and brilliance. It is just that now it expresses itself one blink at a time.

The lead performance by Mathieu Amalric exists in two ways, as the unmoving man in bed and the vital man in his memories and fantasies. In that way it is fundamentally different from Daniel Day-Lewis' work in "My Left Foot," about a man who could move only a toe. At least he could lurch and groan and cry. Both films find the inevitable solution to their challenge, and the right actors to meet them.

Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer, is in large part responsible for freeing the film from its own dangers of being locked in. From the cloudy opening POV shots of Jean-Dominique regaining consciousness, Kaminski fills the screen with life and beauty, so that it's not at all as depressing as it sounds.

At the end we are left with the reflection that human consciousness is the great miracle of evolution, and all the rest (sight, sound, taste, hearing, smell, touch) are simply a toolbox that consciousness has supplied for itself. Maybe it would even be better to be Trumbo's Johnny than never to have been conscious at all.