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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterly

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#1 of 1 Posted 10/16/07 10:33 PM

From harveykarten Posts 798 Last Feb-7
To All [Msg # 22696.1 ]

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Le Scaphandre et le papillon)

Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Miramax Films
Grade: B+
Directed by:    Julian Schnabel
Written By: Ronald Harwood from Jean-Dominique Bauby's novel
Cast:   Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Consigny, Max Von Sydow, Patrick Chesnais, Niels Arestrup
Screened at: Park Ave., NYC, 10/16/07
Opens: December 19, 2007

In perhaps the only case in literature of a major character's succumbing to locked-in syndrome , Noirtier
de Villefort in Alexander Dumas pere's "The Count of Monte Cristo" suffered a paralyzing stroke that
stopped most of his body functions cold. It's difficult to imagine this fate worse than death, worse even
than being in a vegetative, thereby unconscious, state. Imaging being fully awake, cognizant of all that
is going on about you with all a functioning intelligence, yet be unable to move a muscle with only the power to blink your left eye. After hearing that there’s little hope of significant recovery, many would prefer to die, though powerless to act even upon the wish for suicide. Such a fate actually befell a real-life person, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who painfully wrote a best-selling book “Le Scaphandre et le papillon” that became a best-seller. He did not dash it off on a computer, an electric typewriter, or even an old Underwood standard. In fact his was a more difficult authorship than that faced by writers of books and dissertations before typewriters or ball-point pens or fountain pens were invited. He wrote the book with his left eye.

No doubt people would have said, “There’s no way this can become a movie,” but voila, not only did the novel, adapted by Ronald Harwood from Bauby’s best-seller become a film, it became visually resplendent–a kaleidoscope of the man’s actual memories and his life of pure fantasy, the latter exemplified by Bauby in the suit of a deep-sea diver, a prisoner of the outfit and the water, while what he really hoped to do was to become a butterfly. That desire brings to mind another real-life person, Ramon San Pedro, a poet immortalized by Alejandro Amenabar’s 2004 movie, “Mar Adentro”–wherein the writer, played by Javier Bardem, fights a thirty-year battle for euthanasia while wholly paralyzed, though imagining himself soaring above the ocean.

With the cinematic expertise of Steven Spielberg’s oft-used photography director, Janusz Kaminskin, whose underwater camera captures Bauby in a diving suit, Brooklyn-born painter and film director Julian Schnabel (“Before Night Falls,” “Basquiat”) takes us first into a hospital room in the dreary northern French seaside town of Berck. Bauby, whose role is played by Mathieu Amalric (“La Moustache,” “Munich”), is not seen at first, the camera focusing on his blurry view of doctors and attendants hovering over a prostrate body just as he is waking from a 20-day coma. Having suffered a severe stroke while taking his young son on a drive, this mid-forties non-smoker, occasional drinker, and healthy editor of “Elle” magazine is afflicted by a rare illness that causes every muscle in his body to freeze save for his left eye. He cannot even speak, but we in the audience are privy to his cynical thoughts about the neurologist, Dr. Lepage (Patrick Chesnais), who breaks the bad news. As the days go on, he becomes disgusted when attendants turn the TV off, block the view, of not even trying to figure out what the poor man might want to see with his one good eye–his other having been sewn up given its failure to irrigate. (Photographer Kaminskin actually sews up a gooey substance on his lens to simulate the procedure.)

The few friends who do visit him include Roussin (Niels Arestrup), a man who arouses Bauby’s guilt for not calling the man after having given up his own seat in an airline to allow Roussin to travel, leading to the passenger’s being taken hostage in Beirut for four years. Less than half of the picture is taken up with his pleasant memories and fantasies–eating oysters with a beautiful woman in a posh restaurant (a fantasy), picking up his son at the home of the lad’s mother (reality), shaving his elderly father, Papinou (Max von Sydow) (reality). Bauby also conjures up gorgeous, multi-colored visions, his imagination and memory being all that he has to save his sanity under the extreme circumstances in this naval hospital. Especially frustrating to the patient is the fact that all the attendants, particularly the therapists, Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze), Marie (Olatz Lopez Garamendia), and the woman taking the notes for his book, Claude (Anne Consigny), are beautiful–and he can do nothing about this.

Mathieu Amalric, said to be second choice after Johnny Depp for the lead role, acquits himself famously, evoking touching scenes particularly one in which his forgetful father, too old at ninety-two to leave his fourth-floor walk-up apartment, cries at what has become of his loving son. As director Schnabel exhibits the painstaking way that Bauby, nicknamed Jean-Do, must communicate and dictate his book–by blinking each time his literary representative or therapist utters the appropriate letter of the alphabet=–“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is also about the creation of art. Though even at a reasonable one hundred twelve minutes of running time the story becomes repetitious, Schnabel’s film, which sports a delightful soundtrack particularly of the touching “La Mer,” tenderly depicts a man whose spirit may understandably have been low but who overcame his extraordinary handicap as best he could–by telling his story to a large audience.

Not Rated.    112 minutes   © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterly

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