“When I was young I was alone a lot, and art was a place I could escape to,” writes artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel in the introduction to a 2003 overview of his work. “What I wanted to do was find some kind of place where my imagination could not be stopped.” He’s found that place in his third feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed 1997 memoir by former French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who at age 43 suffered a stroke that left him almost completely paralyzed. In the book Bauby’s surreal experience of the present is colored by his memories, dreams, and fantasies—a fitting cinematic canvas for flamboyant painter and sculptor Schnabel, who ignores the boundaries between the representational and the abstract. A new kind of art movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it’s deeply personal yet universal in its humanism.
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Like Schnabel’s two previous, more linear biopics—Basquiat (1996), about drug-addicted painter Jean Michel Basquiat, and Before Night Falls (2000), about imprisoned Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas—The Diving Bell and the Butterfly concerns a creative person confronting adversity. Bauby became a victim of “locked-in syndrome”: he could see, hear, think, and feel as before but could neither speak nor move. He was able, however, to open and close his left eye, and learned to painstakingly blink the letters of the alphabet to communicate. He’s played here by Mathieu Amalric, whose highest-profile role in American movies until now was the debonair military intelligence broker in Munich. He landed the job only after Johnny Depp gave it up to make Pirates of the Caribbean, but he’s so compelling it’s difficult to envision anyone else in the role.
In an inspired choice, Schnabel had the script translated from English into French, with the collaboration of his actors, adding a frisson to a production that in some ways approaches documentary, employing the real-life sites of Bauby’s story—including a hospital where he was treated. Some of the medical staffers who treated him are even cast in the film.
review
Directed by Julian Schnabel
Written by Ronald Harwood
With Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Max von Sydow, and Marie-JosÉe Croze
