The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Blink 182: Marie-Josee Croze hosts the ongoing spelling bee in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Bauby’s eyelash-batting eventually resulted in the best-selling 1997 memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, not exactly a tome that’s ripe for a cinematic adaptation. Yet Schnabel, along with screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and director of photography Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan),
adeptly sidestep tear-jerker cliches while surmounting this movie’s own
unique catalog of physical limitations. The filmmakers dare to capture
Bauby’s first-person viewpoint for the movie’s first 40 minutes, as the
supporting players convey ample wells of compassion while looking
directly into the lens—even as the camera itself darts furtively from
left to right, up and down, even fogging over in a misty-peepered haze,
all to approximate Bauby’s hemmed-in visual canvas. Meanwhile, Bauby
(played by Mathieu Almaric) offers a running off-screen
commentary-narrative for viewers to demonstrate that his mind, still
alive with imagination, proves that he’s emphatically not a human
vegetable.

(Schnabel’s technical accomplishments
are indeed praiseworthy, although some nitpickers are sure to declare
that Alfred Hitchcock got there first. In a 1955 telecast of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents
anthology, the Hitch-directed episode titled “Breakdown,” much of it
also taken from the first-person perspective, featured Joseph Cotten as
a paralyzed car-crash victim who is presumed dead and carted off to a
morgue.) 

Harwood’s script always runs counter to
the expected “human spirit triumphs over adversity” message to ground
this story in realism. Harwood ups the emotional ante during the
flashback sequences that reveal Bauby as an occasionally unpleasant
fellow who is indifferent to Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), the woman who
has always loved him (he dismisses her as “the mother of my children”),
yet even in his paralyzed condition still lusts after Imes (Marina
Hands), the beauty who can’t bear to see him in his hospitalized
condition. Bauby certainly has an eye for the ladies, so to speak: His
speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze) and his transcriber
Claude (Anne Consigny) are knockouts that cause him to opine, in a
voice-over, “Just my luck: Two beauties and I’m stuck!”

Diving Bell has its share of
sadly poignant moments: Bauby’s 92-year-old dad (Max von Sydow) trying
to get through a one-way phone conversation with his son; Bauby’s
nickname Jean-Do could easily be construed as “John Doe”; and a
beachside family reunion in which the kids and dad play—what else?—a
game of Hangman. Yet Schnabel and Harwood also contribute scenes of
needed humor, notably when some telephone workers cluelessly enter
Bauby’s hospital room (“He winked at me!”) and a bit involving a fly
landing on Bauby’s nose (during his minimalist attempts to shoo the
insect, Bauby deadpans, “Olympic wrestling has nothing on this.”)
Schnabel earned a Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards and
actor Amalric should have been a nominee, too, for his sensitive,
challenging performance; as he translates Bauby’s Cyclopean semaphores
into meaningful prose, Amalric boasts the most expressive eyeball in
art-house cinema.

Diving Bell’s DVD from
Miramax/Disney Home Entertainment features a letterboxed (1.85:1) frame
and is offered in its original French-language version as well as an
acceptable English-dubbed option. Schnabel’s commentary track, alas,
contains some informational tidbits but his low-key speaking voice can
be enervating to listen over the long haul. The director also turns up
in a 21-minute excerpt from a 2007 conversation on Charlie Rose’s
late-night chat show just after Schnabel won the Best Director prize at
last year’s Cannes Film Festival; the Rose segment also features the
movie’s trailer. 

A 13-minute behind-the-scenes vignette,
“Submerged,” offers some reactions from the cast members during a press
junket, with Schnabel describing his movie as an examination of “the
essence of consciousness, what it is to be alive.” Rounding out the
extras is the seven-minute “Cinematic Vision,” a quick overview of the
film’s first-person approach, which affords a few glimpses of Almaric
between camera takes and out of character as Bauby.