The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

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Product Description
From Miramax Films acclaimed director Julian Schnabel and the screenwriter of THE PIANIST comes a remarkable and inspiring true story about the awesome power of imagination. Experience the triumphant tale of renowned editor Jean-Dominique Bauby a man whose love of life and soaring vision shaped his will to achieve a life without boundaries. You'll soon discover why David Benby of "The New Yorker" calls THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY "nothing less than the rebirth of the cinema."System Requirements:Running Time: 112 minutes Language: English / Spanish / French Subtitles: English / French / SpanishFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/TRUE STORY Rating: PG-13 UPC: 786936750119 Manufacturer No: 05596700

Amazon.com
The seemingly claustrophobic story of a man imprisoned in his paralyzed body becomes a dazzling and expansive movie about love, imagination, and the will to live. After a stroke, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, Kings and Queen) can only move his left eye--and through that eye he learns to communicate, one letter at a time. With the help of his speech therapist (Marie-Josee Croze, Munich) and a stenographer (Anne Consigny, Anna M.), Bauby writes the stunning memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But such a plot summary makes the movie sound like lofty, self-important medicine--far from it. Director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), working from an elegant screenplay by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and with an oustanding cast (which also includes Frantic's Emmanuelle Seigner as Bauby's neglected wife), has created a movie as engrossing and hypnotic as a thriller, a movie that wrestles with mortality yet has stubborn streaks of dark humor and eroticism, that portrays a man who overcomes unimaginable obstacles but refuses to paint him as a saint. Schnabel was once dismissed as a pompous and overblown painter, but he's crafted an intimate visual poem, a humble sonata about life at its most fragile. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews: Read 51 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Looking Out from a Locked-In Mind May 1, 2008
215 out of 226 found this review helpful

Julian Schnabel, well accepted as one of the important visual artists of our time, continues to impress with his small but elite group of films, proving that paintings and cinema are closely related as a means to reach the psyche. In 'Le Scaphandre et le papillon' ('The Diving Bell and the Butterfly') he has transformed the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby (with the sensitive screen adaptation by Ronald Harwood) into an experience for the mind and the heart. It is an extraordinary blend of visual effects, poetry, exquisite acting, and the perseverance of the human mind to communicate with the world when all seeming variations of communication are stripped away.

Jean-Dominique (Jean-Do) Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) was the editor of the French magazine 'Elle', living with the beautiful Celine Desmoulins (Emmanuelle Seigner) and their three children, when during a ride with his son he has a massive stroke that leaves him completely paralyzed (the 'locked-in syndrome'). When he awakens from his coma he is able to hear and to see but he cannot speak or move, except for his eyes. From this point we, the audience, experience the world as through the eyes of Jean-Do, share his frustrations of being unable to speak, and in his ultimately having to communicate through the fine skills of his speech therapist Henriette Durand (Marie-Josee Croze) by blinking his eye once or twice for yes or no as each letter of the alphabet is spoken - an arduous task for both patient and visitor. He decides he wants to write his memoirs and Claude (Anne Consigny) is assigned to take his 'dictation'. The only faculties Jean-Do retains are his memory and his fantasies, and it is through the acting out of these that we discover the victim's private and secret life as well as his relationships to colleagues and lovers and family. He imagines the hospital where he is confined in the time of Nijinsky (Nicolas Le Riche) and Empress Eugenie (Emma de Caunes) and filters the realities of his life through the interactions with his comrades Laurent (Isaach De Bankole) and others as well as vivid memories of his relationship with his father Papinou Bauby (Max von Sydow). With the patient assistance of the health providers, friends and family he is able to complete his memoir, the story of a man locked in a diving bell longing for the freedom of a butterfly, released form its cocoon. .

Getting used to the film technique Schnabel uses takes patience, but for those who are willing to accept the pace of the film, rich with fantasy and historical sequences, the impact is not only compelling but breathtaking. This telling of a true story is a fine work from all concerned and for this viewer it is one of the best films of recent years. Grady Harp, May 08

4 out of 5 stars

Encased December 26, 2007
30 out of 43 found this review helpful

Julian Schnabel is a fine artist who paints fantastical, brilliant, almost violent works. His films though are another story. "Basquiat," "When Night Falls" and now "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" deal almost exclusively with a man, an artist living within society as a whole but nonetheless living apart from it. Within the context of Schnabel's movie world and by extension his characters, this living apart is natural, is organic to these characters. Their talent, their world vision sets them apart.
In Schnabel's poetic, sad, urgent "When Night Falls" Javier Bardem plays Cuban writer, Reinaldo Arenas: a man both reviled by society and beloved by his reading public. Bardem is bigger than life, makes his mark upon this film as well upon our psyche and our memory. The same can be said about the terrific Jeffrey Wright in "Basquiat" and now Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Dominique Bauby in Schnabel's new "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."
Before his massive stroke, Bauby was the editor of French Elle and Schnabel gives us glimpses of Bauby's glamorous, jet-setting life. There is no doubt that Schnabel feels for Bauby and his condition: a condition which allows Bauby to literally move only one eye lid though Bauby nonetheless manages through a letter recognition system to write his memoir on which this film is based. In several ways though, we get the feeling that Schnabel, through the use of a judicious choice of "before stroke" images, that Schnabel is not always on Bauby's side and that Bauby's current state is a result of his former, hedonistic life style. Editing a glossy woman's magazine does not have the intellectual cache of a brilliant writer or of a brilliant artist and I can't shake the feeling that Schnabel may be more than a bit prejudiced against Bauby here.
The beginning of "TDBATB" is very difficult to get into: all bleached out images, fluttering butterflies and "talking head," reassuring nurses and serious doctors. It is off-putting to say the least: Schnabel at his most arty and least coherent. Then something happens and we begin to get into the groove of Schnabel's vision and world. Schnabel and his writer Ronald Harwood are skirting a slippery slope here: how do you humanize, how do you make human a person who is only marginally those things? You do it, as Schnabel and Harwood do: you show us that Bauby, though horrifically compromised, has a huge intellect still working at maximum capacity inside that hunk of flesh.
It is ironic and effective that Schnabel has chosen the most frenetic and active of French actors to play this role: Mathieu Amalric...so good in "Kings and Queen." Amalric does what he can with the post massive stroke portions of the film to convey humanity but it is in the pre-stroke scenes that he really shines: all "French" handsome, charming and intelligent this Bauby.
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a tough nut to crack and many times you are torn between walking out and downright sobbing but at a certain point towards the middle of the film, Schnabel gets you, keeps you and won't let you go. You commit. You submit.

2 out of 5 stars

A minority opinion February 22, 2008
29 out of 52 found this review helpful

I am aware that this film has received rave reviews all over the place, that it is chosen by many top reviewers as one of the top films of 2007. I have also read a number of intelligent and well- written reviews which highly praise this work. So I understand that what I am about to say is a distinct minority report, an isolated voice of dissent.
I did not like the movie.
I found it mannered, artificial and frankly boring.
I found it extremely hard to feel any sympathy for the major character, the victim, the man in his closed in world , choosing one letter at a time.
The contrast made between his closed- in- condition and his former fantastically hedonistic life in which he has a beautiful family, a number of beautiful lovers, and great aesthetic pleasure- seemed to me quite overdone and pointless.
Even the visit to Lourdes in which the suffering were shown seemed to me done in a mannered, unreal way.
I might also say the quite noble aim of trying to present and give a feeling of what a stroke victim might perceive and feel and know- did not convince.
Again I am not laying down the law here, but only giving one person's impression of the film.

4 out of 5 stars

The Artist of the Floating World December 21, 2007
22 out of 34 found this review helpful

At the age of 43, Elle magazine editor (and womanizer extraordinaire) Jean-Dominique Bauby suffers a severe stroke that leaves his entire body paralyzed, save for one eyelid. The stroke is, in fact, so severe that doctors describe his very rare condition as a "locked-in" state, because although his left eyelid is the only functioning muscle in his body, his brain is perfectly lucid. The accident radically diminishes Bauby's communicative abilities. Eventually, he begins to communicate with nurses and friends via a sort of Morse code of eye twitches, but the process of forming words one letter at a time is tedious to say the least and often invites only intense frustration and intense loneliness. Most of the film is, therefore, Bauby looking on the world with his one eye and speaking to himself. Luckily, his memory and imagination, and, most importantly, his sense of humor, remain intact. Many scenes involve an inert Bauby daydreaming about his female therapists who, ironically enough, resemble Elle models (and these daydreams provide much needed comic relief). Another irony is that, just before the accident, a publisher had been negotiating with Bauby for a memoir. Once he has the accident the publisher, like most of the fashion world, assumes Bauby is a vegetable. To the publishers surprise, however, Bauby decides to go ahead with the project (even though it means writing his memoir one blink at a time). "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is that memoir.

Schnabel, already a long established figure in the world of fine art, has paintings hanging in many of the worlds finest museums. And it is obvious that Schnabel identifies with Bauby, who was a visual artist in his own right. From the opening credits to the word fin ("Diving Bell and Butterfly" is in French with English subtitles), the film is, in many ways, a series of shimmering dream-like surfaces. Surfaces may imply depth but the fact remains that visual art can only hint at the possible depths while literature and film (and other narrative arts) can dwell, or at least offer the illusion of dwelling, in the depths. Schnabel is an artist who exists between mediums and that is evident here as this looks and feels like a piece of visual art first, with narrative being only a secondary concern. This film is, in many ways, a series of impressions only loosely and provisionally linked by Bauby's narrative which is a suspicious one (Bauby calls attention to his own unreliability at least once). Surfaces are dwelled on at length and even if they are not ultimatley to be trusted (because, in the artist especially, the impulse to aestheticize and fabricate and perfect imperfect nature is so strong)they tend to both inspire and to provide solace. Oddly enough, though Bauby had several lovers (so many that the viewer may, at times, have a hard time figuring out just who is who among them) the one that he seems to care most about, "Ines", is never shown (or shown so briefly that she exists primarily as a fantasy or muse).

But, again, everything the artist touches/contemplates/imagines is aestheticized; even his daydreams and fantasies look like the fashion fantasy spreads you see in the pages of, well, women's (and men's) fashion magazines. At times his pre-accident life seems exciting and at times it seems fairly superficial (we experience Bauby's life before the accident only as he remembers it). Some viewers might desire to know less about what it all looked like and sounded like (an excellent rock sountrack includes Velvet Underground & Tom Waits) and more about what motivated such a man to rise to the top of his game. All we really know is that Bauby dedicated his life to visual pleasure and this, more than anything else, is what Schnabel seems to be drawn to. Lovers of visual art (oil painting, graphic art, photography etc...) will respond favorably and most likely be the most outspoken champions of this film; while lovers of narrative art will be divided as to the effectiveness of Schnabel's visual representations of Bauby's locked-in state. The Diving Bell is such an obvious metaphor that it is not as poignant as it should be (plus it may remind some viewers of Dustin Hoffman's scuba scene in The Graduate). And the Butterfly as a metaphor is barely mentioned. The most affecting images are the ones that do not function as metaphors (the intensely vivid close-ups of insect and plant life, the enormous mountains of ice sliding into the sea). Schnabel is at his best when he foregoes conventional rhetorical sense-making and ventures into the pre-or-post-verbal world of hyper-real imagery that symbolizes nothing literally but simply is what it is. In this sense, Schnabel is the cinematic equivalent of a postmodernist. A lot of the imagery feels like borrowed and appropriated documentary footage which is perhaps fitting as Bauby also possessed a flair for exausted-but-forever- renewed aesthetic schemes/scenarios (evidenced in his Marie Antoinette fantasies, and in his desire to re-write 'The Count of Monte Cristo"). Both Schnabel and Bauby share a penchant for quoting the past (art and film history) albeit ironically. And while both share a kind of mercenary attitude toward the arts and women, neither of them are above sentimentality when it comes to father and son relationships.

Perhaps the film is, in the end, a psychoanalytic self-portrait of the artist(s); a self-reckoning whereby the artist attempts to resolve conflicting impulses. On the one hand the artist seeks to live in the glow of the aestheticizing impulse (the mothers love), while, on the other hand, the artist seeks to be valued socially (the father's respect, recognition, and approval). Rarely do artists achieve what they seek or what is necessary or what will suffice to achieve balance in their lives (and that is why more creative work is always necessary). This film expresses better than any other what that balance might feel like were you an artist who had just accomplished such a feat.

5 out of 5 stars

Oscar Contender Alert - Remarkably Powerful Film December 13, 2007
10 out of 15 found this review helpful

Generally, films containing series of disassociative images, tons of POV shots and dream sequences are immediate turn-offs for me. I like my films to have stories and I like those stories to be linear. For the most part.

So, it is more than a little surprising that I liked Julian Schnabel's new film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" based on the life of Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's life. In fact, I didn't just like it, I loved it. It is a great, moving, well-made film.

Jean-Do (Mathieu Almaric) wakes up to find himself in a hospital room in a resort on the coast of France. He quickly learns he is paralyzed from head to toe, cannot speak, and can only blink one eye. As the doctors and their staff visit and do their tests, he learns the prognosis is not good, but they go ahead with more tests and try to help him learn how to adjust to the new life, to rehabilitate him. His estranged wife Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze) visits and can barely look at her husband. One of the physical therapists, Claude (Anne Consigny) is brought on to try to help him learn how to communicate again. She has developed a system; she holds up a card listing all of the letters of the alphabet in the order they are most commonly used. She begins to rapidly go through them. When he hears a letter he wants to use, he blinks. As the words begin to form, she suggests a word. If it is the correct word, she blinks. Jean-Do contacts his publisher, with the help of Claude, and arranges for a transcriber to help him write a book about his experiences. Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner, "The Ninth Gate") arrives and to help him write and cope with his life. Writing the book helps him to remember back to key moments in his life, including interactions with his father, Papinou (Max Von Sydow).

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is really a fairly remarkable film. Schnabel uses all of those elements I mentioned previously, the ones I hate, to evoke what Jean-Do is going through. The film opens with a series of flashes and brief glimpses of objects. We hear Jean-Do narrating and feel his confusion as he tries to figure out where he is. Weak, he can barely keep his eyes open. He quickly realizes a series of doctors are fawning over him, trying to figure out what has happened to him. Schnabel uses a series of quick shots, overexposures, brief images and more to give us a feeling of what is going on in Jean-Do's head. Naturally, he is confused and disoriented and we get a real feeling for that.

This actually goes on for a while, longer than I would've believed possible in order to maintain any sort of narrative. But because we are inside the patients head for so long, we get a real feel for what he is experiencing. As we listen to his narrative, which are essentially his thoughts, and see what he is seeing, in brief glimpses, and learn what he learns, Schnabel and actor Mathieu Almaric paint a remarkably vivid portrait of this man who can only move one eye.

Many actors have portrayed paraplegics in the past, and been richly rewarded for their work with Oscars. Almaric's performance blows them out of the water. For the first twenty or so minutes, we don't even see the actor, but we get a feeling for his character, for his frustration, for his desperation. We are listening to his thoughts and this gives us a great picture of what he is feeling. When we do finally see Jean-Do, we already have a feeling of what this character will be like.

In a film like this, there are usually glimpses into the characters life before the sickness hits, generally told through flashbacks. In "Diving Bell", there are surprisingly few flashbacks to his life before the sickness. These aren't really needed because the actor gives us glimpses of this previous life through his performance. When we do see a glimpse of this life, it is necessary, to help establish a character we haven't met yet, or to set up an event later in the film. One such moment happens when Jean-Do remembers a time when he visited his father, Papinou (Von Sydow) in his Paris apartment. Papinou, an elderly man, is confined to second floor apartment because he can't get up and down the stairs. Jean-Do visits him and gives him a shave. It is a touching moment, filled with emotion because they clearly love each other very much.

The process of writing the book comes to fill the majority of the second act of the film. It is a laborious process, but as jean-Do and Celine get the hang of working with each other, they become more productive. Yet, Jean-Do can't help but comment about how slow the process is, the pains they go through getting accustomed to one another, and more. As Celine gets to know the former magazine editor better, she begins to sense what he is trying to say after he picks up a few letters. In fact, everyone close to him does the same thing. These moments are very helpful to the viewer because they help to show he can communicate and it would become overly tedious if we had to sit and watch him.

All of these moments point to one thing; a filmmaker who knows how to compose the type of portrait he wants to paint for the audience. He doesn't want us to observe Jean-Do and look at the paraplegic and moan about how tragic his life is. He wants us to experience the life and the pain of this life through the subject's eyes. It is a remarkably different type of film portrayal than we usually see and it is extremely effective. Rather than remark about how wonderful Robert DeNiro is or how great Daniel Day-Lewis is (and they both were, in their own rights), Schnabel wants us to see every facet of this man's life. But more importantly, he wants us to see how he deals with all of the problems of being completely immobile. Think about it. A French man who is barely middle aged, living a life many of us would dream about, suddenly wakes up to find he can only move one eye and can't communicate with anyone. Confined to a bed and a wheel chair, he must find new ways to converse with his family and friends and the world. So, Claude is a bit of a godsend, when she arrives and announces she has come up with her new communication system.

But the remarkable thing about "Diving Bell" and Almaric's performance is that this is not the only way he manages to communicate. Amazingly, given the actor is portraying someone who can move only a single part of their body, Almaric makes his character very emotional. With a puffy, permanently pouting lip, an effect of the stroke, Alamric merely looks forward and manages to convey a lot of what Jean-Do is feeling. Because the film so quickly, and effectively, establishes the problems Jean-Do has, we carry this feeling throughout the film, as we watch him convey his emotions with merely a blink of the eye. But as the story progresses, he gets more emotional when he realizes his situation will have more lasting effects and tears swell in his eye.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a remarkably powerful and moving portrait of a man who suffers a fate more horrible than most of us can imagine.

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