No less an eminence than the venerable critic Michel Ciment (he wrote the book on Kubrick, among other things), to whom I was just introduced by the critics' mailboxes at the Palais, agrees with me that Julian Schnabel's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is a pretty solid contender for this year's Palme d'Or. Like me, Monsieur Ciment also found the film imaginative and unsentimental, and he feels it's a good adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, which I can't corroborate myself as I have not yet read it.
Said memoir was composed under the most extraordinary circumstances. Which are what the memoir, and Schnabel's fim, are about.
Bauby, then the 43-year-old editor of the French edition of Elle and quite the man-about-Paris (and elsewhere) suffered a freak cerebro-vascular accident (what used to be called a massive stroke) in December of 1995. He went into a three-month coma and when he awoke was in something called "locked-in syndrome:" he could hear, see, and think but he could not move or speak. All he could do was blink. And only one eyelid. His left one.
Eventually Bauby, with the help of a speech therapist, learned a code by which he could communicate. The method was simple, and arduous; the alphabet, reordered so that the letters followed in descending frequency of use, was recited to Bauby and he blinked when the reciter got to the correct letter. Bauby, who had a book contract at the time he was struck, abandoned his original project and began his memoir. The diving bell of the title refers to his physical state; the butterfly to what he felt his imagination could unleash.
Schnabel's film begins from Bauby's POV just after he awakes, and stays there for an almost impossible length of time. This subjective camera is not as vertigo-inducing as Robert Montgomery's in Lady in the Lake—but it is in fact more uncomfortable. Schnabel, with the considerable aid of inspired cinematograhper Jannusz Kaminski, puts you inside Bauby's head, makes you feel his helplessness and frustration as well as anybody who's not actually feeling it can. It's terrifying, really; I don't think I've ever experienced a better cinematic depiction of the body betraying the self. The movie opens up as Bauby, an extraordinary Mathieu Almaric, develops his way of communicating. Schnabel intersperses flashbacks and fantasias (all beautifully conceived and shot) with remarkable deftness. A scene of the immobilized Bauby on an outing to a beach, seeing his children for the first time since his transformation, twisted up in his wheelchair, is a wrenching sonata of loss.
But Bauby's story is not that of a saint. There's a harrowing scene in which Bauby recieves a call from his craven girlfriend (she's been too chickenshit to visit him in the hospital at all) while his estranged wife is the only person in the vicinity who can "translate" him for the other woman. It definitively proves Bauby was, as they say, no good at being noble.
The story is all the more convincing for that, though, and all the more admirable for never really trying to milk the viewers' tear ducts. It's also worth noting that every performer in the name international cast—Emmanuelle Seigner, Isaach de Bankole, Max von Sydow and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel to name but a few—completely disappears into each of their roles, which I think is as much a testament to Schnabel's talents as to theirs.
A colleague I like very much emerged from the film with the precise inverse of my opinion—she seemed angry about the picture, pronouncing it "silly." Unfortunately, like those characters in the old Antonioni pictures, we couldn't properly communicate with each other at that juncture. But I'll look for her review, because the last thing I thought this picture was was silly.
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