Ever since I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on the first day of press screenings for the New York Film Festival, I've enjoyed telling the film's story to people. You have to tell it just right, with the details in the proper order, to get the maximum impact. The story: Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle and a major figure in the Parisian literary world, suffered a stroke at the age of 43 that paralyzed his entire body except his left eye. His nurse devised a system in which she read out the alphabet and he blinked when she said the letter he wanted, enabling him to “speak” through blinking. Using this system Bauby blinked out an entire memoir.
That's the part where you're supposed to gasp. The amazing thing about Julian Schnabel's film--which takes its name from Bauby's book--is that the entire film is filled with moments like that, where the bravery and struggle involving in telling this story sear your heart all over again.
The first 40 or so minutes of the film are seen entirely from Bauby's (Mathieu Amalric) point-of-view, a risky technique that pays off in the way it links the audience to Bauby's unimaginable condition. We wake up with him and share his realization that he can no longer speak; we watch from the inside as his immobile right eye is sewn shut. The looming faces of doctors and nurses are interspersed with images from Bauby's vast imagination--all he has left--, from childhood memories to pop culture icons he re-imagines as himself (reminiscing about his youthful beauty, he stops for a moment to shout “That's Marlon Brando, not me!”
As Bauby starts to receive visitors, old friends, his girlfriend and their children, he cannot get over the revulsion he feels with himself-- “Now they know their father is a zombie,” he says of his kids. As he mopes, a devoted series of nurses develop their alphabet system; Bauby, with no other choice, participates. His first sentence? “I want to die.” As he comes to term with his condition, though, and realizes the amount of opportunities it has afforded him-- spectacularly symbolized by stock footage of glaciers splitting apart-- he prepares to write his book, and the mordant voice-over changes to the poetic language of Bauby’s book itself.
As Bauby tells the story of life trapped within his own body, a series of flashbacks gives clues about his life before the stroke: though Bauby was clearly a high-profile figure, most of the flashbacks are prosaic--shaving his elderly father, taking a road trip with an old girlfriend he no longer loves. It can be easy to think of people who bravely survive tragedy as being a certain kind of person, unusually strong or empathetic. These scenes with Bauby prove he was nothing of the sort--occasionally arrogant and misguided, certainly not an inspirational story. As Schnabel said in the press conference following the film (excerpted below), “when he was healthy, he was quite superficial and normal…[After the stroke], all of a sudden this guy was put at this vantage point that was very unique. He was able to speak back from that place, and I think he reported back some things that are able to help all of us.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a story about a man who is trapped, immobile in his own body and able to speak only to himself, but the film is so stuffed with visual poetry and moving turns of phrase that it practically takes flight. Jean-Dominique Bauby referred to his body as a “diving bell”-an old-fashioned, immensely heavy diving suit-and his imagination as the butterfly; thanks to Schnabel's inventive telling of Bauby's haunting story, each has handed us a butterfly of our own.
