The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Profoundly beautiful – G. Harris – San Francisco
I have just finished watching The Diving Bell and The Butterfly and I think it is one of the most profoundly beautiful films I have ever seen.
Watching it, I kept thinking that it was one of the best films I’ve ever seen, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the first-rate acting, the message, the visuals, the interaction between this man who could barely communicate but who accepted his limitations.
The story is simple but complicated, lovingly told and lushly photographed. It has subtle nuance that could only come from a French film (even though the director is American), and a delightfully low-tech yet highly accomplished finish.
We loved the way that time was fluid in the film: there were elements of past and present in many shots – empresses, dancers, Bauby as a boy and as a man.
The ceaseless recitation of the alphabet by frequency of use became a comforting koan, almost a lullaby, that I could listen to over and over.
The soundtrack was full of contemporary music, some French, some English and some a little of both and all the songs seemed to fit well, reinforcing the film and filling it in.
This is not a light film, but strong, beautifully shot, superbly acted, and certainly worth seeing.
Merci Julian, Janusz, Mathieu, Emmanuelle, Marie-Josee, Anne and Max. Thank you.
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is a profound feat of filmmaking. It is based on the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man who suddenly finds himself in the kind of medical predicament horror stories are made of: he suffers a stroke resulting in “locked-in” syndrome, wherein Bauby, though aware of his surroundings and able to hear and see people and things around him, is completely paralyzed and unable to respond to anyone or anything (though he comes to gain some control over one of his eyelids, which is remarkably how the real-life Bauby wrote his memoirs of the same name solely by blinking).
It is truly a nightmare of a situation, and yet this film is masterfully made into a thing of beauty and hope. For although Bauby’s own body has completely turned against him and shut down, his mind has not, and the film beautifully depicts the power of the mind and the spirit as Bauby’s vivid imagination sweeps him away from his dreary hospital bed and into all sorts of fantasy excursions, some real-life flashbacks foraying into his past life, and others that appear to only exist as creations of Bauby’s mind. Director Julian Schnabel captures these scenes beautifully, with touches of nostalgia and surrealism that create a beauty from the despair.
Rarely does a film manage to juxtapose the depressing and the hopeful so well. Bauby’s present is bleak and depressing. It is clear he will not recover from his condition, and the film brutally depicts Bauby’s family and friends as they struggle to cope with his predicament. (Perhaps the best, most heart-wrenching scene of the film comes from a one-sided phone conversation between Bauby, who is trapped in his body and cannot speak, and his elderly father (brilliantly portrayed by Max von Sydow), who in his own way is trapped in his apartment and cannot visit his ailing son.)
The strength of Bauby’s spirit when his body is in such dire straits is incredible and inspiring. At times it is difficult to see the film as a happy one–there is nothing about Bauby’s predicament that is happy or hopeful in the least. And yet the fact that Bauby never gives up, never acquiesces to the situation his mind has found his body is as moving and hopeful a story as any. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is not an easy film to watch, but it is a visually stunning story of the power and strength of the human spirit, and the real-life story of a man whose imagination refused to die. BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO: The remarkable and inspirational true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he’d only visited in his mind. The seemingly claustrophobic story of a man imprisoned in his paralyzed body becomes a dazzling and expansive movie about love, imagination, and the will to live. After a stroke, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, Kings and Queen) can only move his left eye–and through that eye he learns to communicate, one letter at a time. With the help of his speech therapist (Marie-Josee Croze, Munich) and a stenographer (Anne Consigny, Anna M.), Bauby writes the stunning memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But such a plot summary makes the movie sound like lofty, self-important medicine–far from it. Director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), working from an elegant screenplay by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and with an oustanding cast (which also includes Frantic’s Emmanuelle Seigner as Bauby’s neglected wife), has created a movie as engrossing and hypnotic as a thriller, a movie that wrestles with mortality yet has stubborn streaks of dark humor and eroticism, that portrays a man who overcomes unimaginable obstacles but refuses to paint him as a saint. Schnabel was once dismissed as a pompous and overblown painter, but he’s crafted an intimate visual poem, a humble sonata about life at its most fragile. –Bret Fetzer The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death
- The Savages
- The Lives of Others
- My Left Foot (Special Edition)
- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days