The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Film Review
Movie Review | 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'
Body Unwilling, a Heed Takes Flying
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
- NYT Critic's Selection
- Directed by Julian Schnabel
- Biography, Drama
- PG-13
- 1h 52m
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 existent people, and in each example the protagonist struggles with a condition of literal or metaphorical imprisonment. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mr. Schnabel'due south younger colleague in the New York art scene of the 1980s, is trapped past addiction and past his outsider condition. Reinaldo Arenas, the gay Cuban poet whose memoir was the basis of "Before Night Falls," is censored, harassed and locked upwards by successive dictatorships.
Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French fashion magazine editor and the writer 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 office perfectly, but his torso was virtually completely paralyzed. He could not move or speak. In the moving picture 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 y'all heard? Jean-Dominique is a vegetable."
"What kind of vegetable?" Jean-Dominique wonders. "A carrot? A pickle?" Like his condition, the metaphor is vicious, but not altogether unredeemable. Equally we come to understand in the course of this fierce and lovely film, his beingness is not that of a vegetable but rather of a garden, a hothouse of consciousness, retentivity and ecstatic imagination.
Jean-Dominique is played past Mathieu Amalric, a French histrion whose twitching, antic physicality makes the grapheme'south immobility all the more painful. Merely "The Diving Bong," true to its hero and its literary source, is neither morbid nor mawkish. Propped up in a wheelchair, able to communicate merely by blinking his left eye (the other, in 1 especially nightmarish scene, has been sewn shut to prevent infection), he remains a sensualist, a bon vivant and a neat literary wit.
Only never a saint. Before his stroke Jean-Dominique led a life of glamour, pleasance and self-indulgence, for which he never apologizes. He had recently left Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), his longtime partner and the mother of his three children, an abandonment that seemed to follow a series of betrayals. Céline appears, notwithstanding, at the hospital in Berck, fighting back tears and demonstrating a loyalty that comes shut to masochism. In spite of his lapses, she conspicuously loves Jean-Dominique, and she is not alone. Besides other women (Marina Easily, about memorably), at that place are acquaintances, colleagues (notably Isaach de Bankole) and Jean-Dominique'southward father, a rogue of the old schoolhouse played with magnificent poignancy by Max von Sydow.
The phrase "triumph of the human spirit" hovers over "The Diving Bong and the Butterfly," forth with a swarm of other empty, uplifting clichés. But Mr. Schnabel and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, accept other themes in mind. Limitation, constraint, incarceration — these may exist, as I've suggested, the shared premises of Mr. Schnabel's films (and also of some of Mr. Harwood'due south piece of work, notably his script for "The Pianist").
Their common subject, notwithstanding, is freedom, the cocky-willed liberation of a difficult, defiant private. But Mr. Schnabel is not content simply to land 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 nonetheless he besides shows astonishing formal command. The movie begins claustrophobically, as we meet the blurry bustle of the infirmary room from Jean-Dominique's hazy, panicked perspective. Faces loom of a sudden and awkwardly into view, while his captive consciousness writhes in its cage, trying to make contact with the earth outside.
Subsequently a while it does, with the help of a speech communication therapist (the marvelously sensitive Marie-Josée Croze) who patiently teaches Jean-Dominique to turn his left eyelid into a means of advice. She sits beside him, reciting the alphabet and stopping when he blinks, piecing together words and sentences from his signals.
Afterwards an agent (Anne Consigny) takes her place, and together she and Jean-Dominique compose the compact, lyrical book that volition become Mr. Schnabel's expansive, passionate film. Their attention also introduces both the patient and the audition to an intense, nonsexual intimacy that is itself a grade of love.
As Jean-Dominique'southward eloquence takes flight, and then does Mr. Schnabel's. Condemned to live in an eternal nowadays, Jean-Dominique is also freed from the tyranny of time, and so the picture ranges freely into fantasy, speculation and remembrance, given shape non past a plot merely 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, only which he appreciated all the more acutely for that reason.
And then, curiously enough, a picture 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.
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is rated PG-thirteen (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some sexual situations.
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Julian Schnabel; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Ronald Harwood, based on the book "Le Scaphandre et le Papillon" by Jean-Dominique Bauby; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Juliette Welfling; music by Paul Cantelon; produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Kilik; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.
WITH: Mathieu Amalric (Jean-Dominique Bauby), Emmanuelle Seigner (Céline), Marie-Josée Croze (Henriette), Anne Consigny (Claude), Patrick Chesnais (Dr. Lepage), Niels Arestrup (Roussin), Olatz Lopez Garmendia (Marie Lopez), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Begetter Lucian/Lourdes vendor), Marina Hands (Josephine), Issach de Bankole (Laurent), Max von Sydow (Papinou) and Anna Chyzh (model).
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/movies/30divi.html