Jean-Dominique Bauby, Jean-Do to his loved ones, was an editor for the Parisian branch of Elle magazine before he suffered a stroke at 43 and became paralyzed in all but one eye. A playboy of sorts,
he was also a great father, an irresponsible husband, and an excellent writer. Suffering the locked-in syndrome and communicating via a visual alphabet, Bauby dictated the abstract yet wholly absorbing account of his days trapped inside his own body, which he equates with living in a diving bell. His account became an autobiography of sorts and was published two days before he succumbed to heart failure.

Julian Schnabel’s multi-award-winning film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly takes its title from said book and, like its source material, has a spiffy discordance to it. When Bauby (the great Mathieu Amalric) opens his eyes, the camera, and so we, are struck by light in the same petrified and blurry way Bauby is. Manipulated to Brakhage-like lengths, the image has an equivalent effect to Jean-Do’s fumbling voiceover; we are as unsure of his footing as he is. His pleading to not sew up an eye threatened by infection becomes our begging; we don’t want to lose the slight view we have. Then, with little preparation, we aren’t with the protagonist anymore and are looking at a frozen, terminally twitched face in a hospital bed.

Henceforth, shifts between the realities of his petrified state and the fantastic remembrances of a life once lived with playboy abandon create a surprisingly fluid whole. Bauby, a lady’s man like no other, amuses himself with thoughts of his various female rehabilitators and therapists of all shapes and sizes. In a wondrous scene, the man sits at a fancy restaurant with an interlocutor (the radiant Anne Consigny) and pigs out on iced oysters, oversized langoustines, and a dozen other plates of seafood, pausing at moments to make out. These are his flights of fancy to the life he used to lead and would still be living if not for the fateful day of the stroke; these make up the ever-impressive butterfly of memory.
The memories he conjures up, mostly about past lovers or moments with his father (a terrific and touching Max Von Sydow), are coloured like fantasies yet have been Bauby’s actual experiences. Moments of real fantasy congeal, notably when Bauby fantasizes about his hospital’s patron saint, but vivid instances such as a naked lover (Marina Hands) painted in red neon and the walk down an island street to gaze at religious statues and artefacts cause sublime tremors of heartache.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly colours inside the lines but does so with a dandy sense of personal rhythm. The publishing of the book and Jean-Do’s death are dealt with hastily, but his time at the hospital and the procedure of mastering a special alphabet are handled with confidence and a careful hand. Schnabel’s filmmaking has become substantially more audacious, introducing bewildering moments of hesitant avant-gardism into his palette. A famed troublemaker and loudmouth, Schnabel here seems fittingly restrained with a respectful glint of melancholy.

The director has made it his business to create biopics that allow for visual flair rather than narrative sweep: an audacious black artist in Basquiat; a man-hungry Latin poet in Before Night Falls. Most surprising here is how discreetly Schnabel shoots moments of flagrant melodrama, including visits from Bauby’s wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) and kids, a phone call from his father, and the clipped communications with the woman he left his family for. Without doubt, these moments are sad but they are not manipulative in any way. The weight of Bauby’s departure from these people’s daily lives is felt but not prematurely mourned. Schnabel, an artist of many trades, is assured in his knowledge that Bauby, an artist in his own way, would have never stood for sappiness. It takes one to know one, I suppose.

Chris Cabin