The paralysed main character of this biopic is upstaged by the director himself
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (12A)
dir: Julian Schnabel
Long before Kate Winslet declared, in the first series of Extras, that "you're guaranteed an Oscar if you play a 'mental'", it was accepted that portraying a disabled character could offer a fast track to awards. Alas, that won't be the case for Mathieu Amalric, who plays Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man stricken with "locked-in syndrome", in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The nature of the film, and the medical condition it describes, deny him the ostentatious acting challenges that usually come with this territory.
In the subjective parts of the picture, shot from Jean-Dominique's viewpoint, Amalric is even relegated to the role of narrator. It is unusual for an actor to be upstaged by the very film in which he plays the lead, but the director, Julian Schnabel, never lets us forget that he and his cinematographer Janusz Kaminski are the real stars here.
Jean-Dominique was known as "Jean-Do", an abbreviation that echoes the name John Doe, employed in the US to refer to unidentifiable persons. That became horribly fitting after Bauby suffered a massive stroke in December 1995: his face was frozen in an outraged grimace, the lower lip jutting out of a lopsided mouth, the septic right eye sewn shut by doctors. The film might have been called My Left Eye, as that was the only part of him that wasn't paralysed. And, like Christy Brown's left foot, Jean-Do's flickering eyelid becomes the tool of his artistic release. A therapist introduces a system of communication based on blinking - one blink for yes, two for no. An assistant reels off the alphabet repeatedly while Jean-Do painstakingly constructs words, whole sentences and eventually the entire memoir from which the film is adapted.
Cinema has always struggled to depict the creative process, so it's novel to see a literary life that can't be quantified in overflowing wastepaper baskets. Jean-Do does not have that luxury - he edits in his head. It is there that the film's most expressionistic passages take place. The hospital is on the coast in the Pas de Calais, and the visual metaphors have an aquatic flavour: shelves of ice crumble into the sea, and Jean-Do imagines himself suspended in the ocean depths in a diving bell, or trapped in his wheelchair on a pier isolated from land by the tide.
In flashbacks, we see his former life as the editor of French Elle, mixing with the great, the glamorous and Lenny Kravitz. I doubt it is accidental that these are the film's dullest scenes: Schnabel is surely arguing that Jean-Do becomes more creative and liberated after his stroke. The scriptwriter, Ronald Harwood, uses the gulf between Jean-Do's inner and outer lives to toy with the audience's perspective, at the risk of making us feel superior to the characters on screen.
When engineers instal a telephone in Jean-Do's room, they cannot comprehend why this patient, who can only pant, would require such an item. "Maybe he's a heavy breather," smirks one of the men, only to be reprimanded by Jean-Do's carer Claude (Anne Consigny). What she doesn't know is that Jean-Do is chuckling on the inside and chiding her for being humourless. We can laugh along, too, because we can hear his interior monologue. But it's cheap, dishonest laughter: wouldn't any reasonable person have stuck up for a defenceless man?
What is most off-putting about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the suspicion that it is more a celebration of Schnabel's technical audacity than a faithful study of its subject's life. The same could not be said of Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside, a clear influence on this film, in which a paraplegic man's confinement does not stop the camera roaming here, there and everywhere, in imitation of his mind. But Schnabel loses sight of who Jean-Do is (not to mention the various women in his life, who are indistinguishable from one another).
There are moments when the film makes actual contact with the audience, notably in a distressing scene featuring the grizzled Max von Sydow as Jean-Do's father, blubbing down the phone at a son who can only blink in reply. In other respects, the picture itself exhibits signs of locked-in syndrome, and finally keeps us locked out.
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