It is a slow agony...
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is harrowing. Director Julian Schnabel
brings us so skillfully into this sad true story that we are left in silent
despair when it is over. The film is an absorbing ordeal of a grim reality. I
doubt that anything like it has been done before.
In the
opening scene, we see a man in a hospital bed, paralyzed completely, victim of a
rare event called a “locked-in”stroke. He is Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu
Amalric) the vital, cosmopolitan, editor of Elle Magazine. He is 43. One eye
must be sewn closed for lack of liquid, the lid of his other contains the only
viable muscle left in his body. He can blink once for yes, two for no. As an
artist, director Schnabel creates effectively the noisy, invasive chaos that
surrounds the silent man. Only one old friend, in a parade of individuals who
consider him invisible, lingers to talk directly to him.
Director
Schnabel shows us most of the movie through Jean Do’s one, often unfocused, eye.
We will see his physical world (excepting a few flashbacks), and we will hear
his emotional world – entirely focused - through the internal comments he makes
to himself. No one around him can hear a word because he cannot make a sound. It
is slow agony.
Though
neither his imagination nor his memory is impaired, he is entombed with both. He
can only watch the people who pass through his life: a harsh doctor, his
children, their mother, and a brave friend. Any visit is an ordeal for them and
for him. What can they say when he can’t answer? As he watches from a wheelchair
on the beach, the wind ruffles his children’s hair and his wife’s dress blows
very gently in the breeze. Their fluidity in the breeze, his rigid self.
The one who
does understand that Jean-Do’s mind functions perfectly is the extraordinary
Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze). She is the physical therapist who responds by
repeating the alphabet over and over, encouraging him to spell, one letter at a
time. With a spiritual patience that transcends compassion, Henriette
transcribes the book he writes by responding to her cues. Never once can he
convey the emotion that is so alive in his mind. The articulate, witty man who
fashions marvelous phrases from his thoughts, cannot move a muscle or say a
word.
We spend an
extended visit in the company of a man whose limbs and muscles are rigid, whose
mind still works in fluid beauty. When the screen goes dark, we are surprised,
in the collective of the audience, to find ourselves sitting in a kind of taut
tension that reflects the tragedy of what we have seen. The book was published
as “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly;” this is the movie that came from it, and
it is the product of the entombed but vital mind of a very brave man.
Copyright (c) Illusion