Salvaging beauty from despair
Science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison titled one of his most famous stories "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." That's what it must be like to be paralyzed, a sentient person trapped in a body that no longer does your bidding.
We've read accounts of people like this and maybe tried to imagine what that must be like. But "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is the first chance we've had to fully appreciate that horror. It's a movie that brilliantly mimics that experience and still finds hope and triumph in what must, by definition, be the bleakest of tales.
This is a "My Left Foot" that limits its hero to his left eye. That's all Jean-Dominique Bauby could move after a stroke left him wholly incapacitated. He was 43, a writer and the editor of Elle magazine. And then one day he wakes up in a hospital on the coast of France.
Doctors and rehab nurses try to fill him in on what has happened. They have to bend down into the film frame so that Bauby can see them. He can't move his head. His hearing is fuzzy. He fades in and out of consciousness.
But he starts to collect his wits, and as he does, he finds his wit and his rage at what has happened. He is surrounded by beautiful women he can no longer impress, seduce or touch. Pretty Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) is his speech therapist. Pretty Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia) will work with the rest of his body. They have hope, or say they do. He wants to die. That's the first thing he communicates to Henriette, who teaches him to blink as she runs through the alphabet, helping him present his thoughts to an outside world he can no longer reach any other way. This will be his new life.
"This is life? This is life?"
His despair at suffering from what his doctors call "locked-in syndrome" gives way to the quiet frustration of therapy. Flashbacks tell the story of the loves he left behind or who leave him behind. His aged and infirm father (Max Von Sydow) calls. He remembers the work at Elle and the novel he had been planning.
And as he equates his new life to being in a diving bell, encased, unable to fully interact with the world, he decides to change the subject for that book. With the help of an absurdly patient assistant, he will report back from his diving bell world and let his mind be a butterfly, taking him on a journey through the life he lived in all its consequential and inconsequential detail.
Schnabel, the painter who began his film career with a definitive biography of painter-hustler Jean Michel Basquiat and whose "Before Night Falls" captured the life of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas (and launched Javier Bardem to stardom), does what only a non-film-school filmmaker could manage. He all but reinvents the first-person narrative.
A running concern of Schnabel's seems to be living the artistic life, even if there are tragic consequences. In Bauby, he sees a subject who might have had his creative side, working with models, popularizing this fashion or that one. The man didn't discover his calling, his depth, until everything except his life was taken from him.
He just did what artists do, in good times and bad, through glory and despair. He created. Whatever else he was in life, a brilliant writer or a shallow romantic heel now trapped in a diving bell, that creative need, Schnabel suggests, made Bauby noble. And that ennobles this film, as well. It's one of the best pictures of 2007.