The notion of sitting through an entire movie about a paralyzed man
who can move just one eyelid—and, eventually, gurgle a
little—is not a promising one. So despite the rapturous reviews
the movie had been receiving, I went into the theater deeply skeptical.
By the time I left, I was convinced global warming could be reversed
(uh, there’s this fantastic image? in the closing credits? of a glacier
reconstituting itself? never mind) and I felt like several hundred
thousand dollars (uh, it’s set in France? and the euro is much stronger
than the dollar right now? never mind). This adaptation of The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a memoir of a paralyzed man, is an
exercise in weighty optimism, and in exhilarating cynicism. It’s a
little too much, but it’s exactly what you needed.
The film opens with the unfocused, uncomprehending gaze of
Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), former editor of the French
Elle, who was instantly and completely paralyzed from his toes
all the way past his grimacing mouth. We can’t see his face yet. The
audience is locked in to the limited field of the patient’s
gaze—and so we are preserved, like Jean-Do (as he is known to his
friends), from the horror of his disfigurement. Alongside Jean-Do, we
see the light coming through the curtains and the bundle of roses by
his bedside; we hear his acerbic thoughts and feel his frustration that
he can’t express them. But it isn’t only that we are like the paralyzed
man: He is also like us. Mute, at the mercy of other people to wheel us
in front of novel sights, dependent on them to tell us
stories—this is the description of a moviegoer, except Jean-Do’s
state is permanent and involuntary. Is this how the curt, despondent
Jean-Do wins us over so quickly?
He’s funny, too. After he convinces the doctors he’s awake and
sentient, Jean-Do begins a difficult project of rehabilitation, made
more tolerable by the fact that both his physical therapist (Olatz
López Garmendia) and his speech therapist (Marie-Josée
Croze) are fetching. He receives visitors, who inform him that all of
Paris has heard he’s a vegetable. “What kind of vegetable?” he wonders
in voiceover. “A carrot? A potato? A cornichon?”
Not everything is so cute. Henriette, the speech therapist, teaches
Jean-Do how to spell out sentences by blinking his one good eye as she
cycles quickly through the letters of the French alphabet, ordered from
most commonly used to least. The first thing he spells is “I want to
die.” Henriette freaks out. “It’s disrespectful; it’s obscene!” she
screams in our faces—remember, we’re still locked into Jean-Do’s
eye socket. She apologizes, but the tension and hurt remains. The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly scrupulously avoids the syrupy and
maudlin; what’s left is difficult to watch.
The ’80s art star Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before
Night Falls) directs, and he kindly supplies us—and
Jean-Do—with beauty to salve the pain. As Jean-Do realizes he can
escape the confines of his body through the twin hatches of memory and
imagination, the film gets drunk on visuals. (The cinematographer is
Janusz Kaminski.) There’s the entrancing image of a woman’s hair
skittering over the camera lens like some kind of brunette sea anemone.
There’s a fantastical vision of the Empress Eugénie, wife of
Napoleon III, who founded Jean-Do’s hospital in the 1860s for
tubercular children. There’s the ersatz glory of a glowing plastic
Virgin Mary purchased from a huckster at Lourdes. If Schnabel’s brand
of supersaturated loveliness seems conventional, that’s all right.
We’re in the mind of a fashion magazine editor, after all. We’re
savoring the things Jean-Do misses, and everything he misses is colored
by desire.
But what’s more significant than the visual style of this film is
the way Schnabel can take a static sequence—almost a painting,
really, with a soundtrack—and make it shake with emotion. It’s
the essential problem of a movie about a paralyzed man, and Schnabel
nails it. There’s a scene where Jean-Do asks his estranged wife,
Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), to read him the letter board so he
can take a phone call. It’s the weekend; his usual staff isn’t
available. The person on the other side is Jean-Do’s mistress.
Céline agrees. The conversation is needy and vicious and loving.
The three of them get through it. You the audience are still stuck with
Jean-Do’s narrow point of view, boring straight ahead, but suddenly
your empathy has to stretch farther than that. It hurts. And it is
gorgeous filmmaking. 
