Review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) by Manny C — 10 Jan 2011

I truly love it when a movie based on true events tells its story so unconventionally with disregard for schmaltz or Hollywood bullshit. That's what happens when you get a film from maverick director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls). The very first scene of his haunting and hypnotic Diving Bell and The Butterfly is of a single eye opening and emerging from a coma. The person it belongs to is Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle, and he's just suffered a stroke that has left him paralyzed. He's trapped in the diving bell of his own body. All he can move is is left eye, his eyelid blinking like a butterfly. In his final years in that state he managed to compose an entire memoir through the process of blinking. An assistant speaks the alphabet aloud and Bauby blinks to signal what he's communicating. The book he composed was published in 1997, just three days before he died at the age of forty-five.

This movie, make no mistake, is a total knockout. Schnabel has a thing for artists and maverick spirits, and Diving Bell is his best and most daring film yet. And Matieu Amalric deserves heaps of praise for his gut-wrenching performance. In flashback we see Bauby living life with risk insensitive vigor. Equally superb is Max Von Sydow as Bauby's heartbroken father, and Marie-Josee Croze as thetherapist who teaches him his system of communication. It's a marvelous salute to a marvelous soul.