THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Director: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Max Von Sydow
Run Time: 112 minutes
Country: France
Language: France with English subtitles
Rating: PG (Coarse language)

By turns dreamlike, brave and breathtaking, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY – a Special Presentation at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival® and winner of the best director prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival – is the beautiful adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby‘s affecting, revelatory memoir.

Once a successful fashion editor and carefree womanizer, Bauby awoke one day to find himself a prisoner in his own body. He had been paralyzed by a massive stroke that rendered him powerless to move a muscle – except his left eyelid. This flawless gem of a film is among filmmaker and artist Julian Schnabel‘s finest works. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, MUNICH) follow Bauby (movingly played by Mathieu Amalric), recreating his subjective agony and his most intimate memories. His wife (Emmanuelle Seigner), whom he had left a year before the stroke, selflessly attends him and goes so far as to translate correspondence between him and a new lover. He wrestles with feelings of regret over missed oppor-tunities for happiness, though he mostly feels guilty for not having spent more time with his children.  

Bauby‘s nurses develop an ingenious, if exhausting method of communication, through which he painstakingly writes his memoirs. By listening to the letters of the alphabet and blinking when the correct one is uttered, he is able to preserve his final link to the outside world – the winking butterfly that frees him from the diving bell of his broken body. As we are shown more of Bauby‘s life in flashback, the lines between dream, memory, hallucination and consciousness begin to falter, granting us insight into the mind of someone in a near-vegetative state. Schnabel‘s painterly creativity runs free here, showing us dense colours and visions limited only by his – and Bauby‘s – powers of fabrication.  Schnabel has favoured misunderstood artist characters in his previous films BASQUIAT and BEFORE THE FALLS. When he was healthy, Bauby was desensitized to life. Trapped in a phenomenological jail, he is reborn, as Schnabel points out, as a pure . THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY should cement his reputation as an artist of supreme achievement.

"It is wonderful: a rhapsodic adaptation of a memoir, a visual marvel that wraps its subject in screen romanticism without romanticizing his affliction. It left me feeling euphoric." -    Chicago Tribune

Reviews: www.metacritic.com/film/titles/divingbellandthebutterfly