Customer Reviews

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (El Llanto De La Mariposa) [NTSC/REGION 1 & 4 DVD. Import-Latin America]

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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 Céline 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-Josée 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 Eugénie (Emma de Caunes) and filters the realities of his life through the interactions with his comrades Laurent (Isaach De Bankolé) 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

On December 8, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, known as Jean-Do to his intimates, age forty-three, editor-in-chief of the world-famous fashion magazine, Elle, was living the "good life" to the extreme when he became the victim of a devastating cerebro-vascular accident that left him in a state of total paralysis, incapable of any verbal communication, in what is known in the medical community as "locked-in syndrome." His mental faculties totally intact as he laid motionless in his hospital bed, Bauby learned to communicate with the outside world using his left eyelid, the only part of his body over which he still had any control. During the next fourteen months, using a communication code developed by his therapist and his publisher's assistant, who transcribed this code, Bauby was able to compose, letter by letter, a lyrical and heartbreaking memoir of his life struggle, "Le Scaphandrier et le papillon." Bauby died in 1997, two days after its publication.

From Bauby's tragic story, Schnabel has produced an ambitious film which succeeds on all levels. The problem facing Schnabel to bring the book to the screen was how to keep the spectator interested beyond the dramatic situation itself? To this end, he uses several solutions in succession.

The first thirty minutes of the film are entirely shown in subjective camera. Without any mannerisms or filmic embellishment, Schnabel succeeds in making the spectator conscious of the patient's terrible situation and of his feelings facing his state of total helplessness. At this point, the transposition of our mind is such that the profound disquiet goes beyond simple empathy, becoming also physical.

Schnabel builds the suspense by progressively revealing the face of the patient. It takes about thirty minutes into the film before we get to clearly see Bauby's distorted, frozen face. From the very beginning of the film, we are not witnessing the story of a man, but we will be this man. But it would be pretentious to say that we will then understand him, the aim of the film being only to paint his intimate portrait, using this ingenious technique.

Following this long expository scene, the focus of the film now shifts toward Jean-Do's interaction with the people who surround him. These interactions are enough to make the Schnabel's film heartrending and less lyrical or pathetic as it progresses and becomes more of a narrative. This is certainly not a film gimmick to relieve the unbearably oppressive atmosphere crushing the viewers, but a means to keep their interest.

In what follows, we see episodes of Jean-Do's fantasies, a mixture of memories and dreams, some poignant and some comical or sexy, with some fantastic mise-en-scènes. Jean-Do days resemble parades on a catwalk, about which he was most familiar, as he is constantly visited by the beautiful women who now populate his life: his speech therapist, Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), who will teach him the communication code, his physiotherapist, Marie Lopez (Olatz Lopez Garmendia), his estranged partner and the mother of his three children, Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), comes to see him often and help out as much as she can, organizing a picnic on the beach with the whole family on Father's day, or reading to Jean-Do the voluminous mail that he receives daily. And of course, there is Claude (Ann Consigny), who patiently transcribes Jean-Do's "dictations." Bauby, in order to survive his ordeal without losing his mind, had decided to write a memoir, would it be only to prove to his ex-colleagues that he was not a "vegetable" ("What kind? "he asks, "a carrot? a leek?" In a beautiful metaphor, Schnabel literally showing the diving bell which physically imprisons the patient, and the freeing of his imagination in the form of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis and fluttering among fields of flowers may be decorative, but it is certainly appropriate. The desperately claustrophobic atmosphere at the beginning of the film dissipates somewhat with Bauby's realization of the new freedom left to him by hanging onto his humanness.

The ending of this film consists of a dream sequence showing the opening scene of Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), but this time the film is in color, as Jean-Do is driving through Paris in his new car. He is happily going to see his children at his estranged wife's country house. He takes his son, Theophile (Theo Sampaio) for a ride and suffers a stroke. The music in Truffaut's film, linking the beginning and the end of his production, accompanies Antoine Doinel as he escapes the delinquent's school to freedom and happiness only to meet imprisonment, as now Jean-Do has.

The acting of Mathieu Almaric as Jean-Do is outstanding, and he bears a large responsibility for the film's success. Whether in the flashbacks and fantasies, as the ostentatious ladies' man, or when he stares into the camera with his drooling face, frozen and yet so eloquent, and as the voice-over, where Almaric is another aspect of the Jean-Do, mischievous, sardonic, despairing, lyrical, at no time in this film can Almaric's credibility be questioned.

An exceptional cast of supporting actors and actresses all provide intense richness of emotions, acting with restraint, with hints of modesty and shyness, contrasting with Jean-Do's absolute and candid thoughts. In particular, the four women are superb. Schnabel seems to have made them a little indistinguishable, since for Jean-Do, connected to life mostly through women, they must each have represented the eternal, untouchable feminine. Patrick Chesnais is perfect as Dr. Lepage, the stereotypical doctor, mixing cynicism with some compassion, who is there for himself and incidentally for his patients. Schnabel is to be congratulated for his discerning choice of exclusively using French actors.

Ronald Harwood, screenwriter for Roman Polanski's two most recent films, The Pianist (2002) and Oliver Twist (2005), wrote the screenplay which is the backbone of this film. While maintaining the basic structure of the book, Harwood succeeds rather well in pacing the story between immobility and action. However, the key to his success is in making the camera become the man. This is not a new idea, but neither is it a melodramatic gimmick here, and at precisely the right moment Harwood's perspective changes, and his film follows a little more closely the demands of a traditional biography. Friends and family from Bauby's life are introduced one by one, but never in a predictable way, nor based upon clichés.

Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List/1993, Saving Private Ryan/1998), Spielberg's chief cinematographer for the last fifteen years, is brilliant. Rarely has the subjective camera been so well handled: camera out of focus to express the blurring caused by tears; the fades out to black corresponding to the blinking of the eyelid; the occasional leaning of the camera and the brusqueness of some trackings harmoniously fade the shots into the subjective camera. The sets are all spectacular. The image is at times out-of-focus, sometimes brilliant and colorful, sometimes blinding and off-center: this is truly the work of Schnabel, the painter.

Schnabel, perhaps by accident, provides a free endorsement for the French governmental health system. The whole film takes place on the backdrop of the public Maritime Hospital at Berk-sur-Mer, in northern France. However, viewing the medical care provided to Bauby and the environment of the establishment, American audiences will be forgiven for thinking that this is a special private hospital where only well to do people, such as Bauby, are treated. Not so, this is simply a public hospital, typical of where any French person gets his or her free care.

As in all Schnabel's other film, the soundtrack plays an important part. In this film, the rather eclectic music mix, from Lolita by Nelson Riddle, to Jean Constantin's theme of Les 400 coups, to U2, Nino Rota, Tom Waits, and Paul Cantelon, who wrote piano music for the film, gives the film a contemporary rock-punk connotation.

Schnabel raises several points. He touches the question of continuity in relationships, when the other person becomes a mere shadow of his or her old self, in particular, when the relationship has been intense and at the same time fragile in time and faithfulness. This is raised in a heartbreaking scene, where Céline becomes the unwilling intermediary between Jean-Do and Inès, Inès telling Jean-Do that she cannot bear to come and see him as he is now.

Schnabel describes the souvenirs and bits of one's life that one must be seeing while standing before the gates of death, but in this particular case taking just a little longer. However, Jean-Do has already died, and has come back to life as an eye.

The film is also about what it means to be an artist. Sickness is a bit like genius, a source of misunderstanding and exclusion, and the artist, like the patient, is in constant battle against the outside world. To escape one's fate, society's cruelty and restraints, one can only rely on one's own intelligence, creativity, and heroism. By reaching deep within himself, Bauby extends his life beyond the limitations of his body by dreaming and creating a work of art. It's a face-off against himself, where the Superego, the butterfly, gains the upper hand over the Ego, the diving bell. Schnabel is a spiritual man, but not a religious one. He believes in the goodness of people, and in their capacity for being patient with their fellow humans and treating them well, just for the sake of it, the way the women in the film give freely of themselves, trying to help Jean-Do.

Finally, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a simple but powerful lesson about life, not in the moralistic sense, but in the energy it carries. As Bauby says in voice-over at the beginning of the film, the lesson is that we should experience life, living in the present, learning to recognize and appreciate the small moments of happiness as they come along, and most importantly, to love.

"Locked-in Syndrome", a fate worse than death afflicts Jean-Dominique Bauby in this true story of the final chapter of the remarkable life of the Elle editor and famous Parisian. With a healthy mind and a useless body, Bauby experiences the horror of only being able to communicate with the outside world by closing one functioning eyelid. Adding to his torturous existence is that Bauby's mind was meant to be shared with the world. As an author, editor and shining member of the intellectual elite, Bauby dazzled those who came in contact with him. When his body died, his great thoughts did not go away. He could not turn off his creativity, his dreams, his desires or his memories...he just had no way to share them.

The first half of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" details the opening months of that living hell. One could not think of a worse existence than being in a hospital room with a TV turned to an off-air station during the overnight hours when it blares an alarm. With no way of changing the channel or asking for help, he suffers for what must have seemed like an eternity. His days are filled hating the sights of endless doctors, specialists and therapists, all motivated to help their "famous patient", hope not shared by Bauby. All he gains from these visits is an occasional cheap thrill as he's able to ogle one of the many young, Elle reading specialists who dote over him like a superstar.

Nearly all of these scenes are filmed from the POV of Bauby, with his internal thoughts providing sardonic commentary to the action in the hospital room. This provides an uncomfortable presentation, as the audience experiences the realities of his life and thoughts. Once a solution to his communication problem is presented and a system is developed where his eyelid movements spell out his words and thoughts, he's able to slowly (V e r y S l o w l y) communicate with the world again. What begins as a devastating declaration to his therapist of "I W a n t D e a t h" eventually grows into his memoirs. The book titled "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", penned at one blink at a time becomes his last gift to the world, a collection of his dreams, his regrets, and his loves.

Bauby's book is the work of a dying man dreaming about living again. Not angry or jealous, he wants one last chance to speak about the beauties of life, from the love of a great woman to dinner at Paris' finest restaurant. Scenes of his book are dramatized in the film and come across as strange Charlie Kaufman-like creations where images from his healthy life blend with his hospital setting and are often colored by stories from history or fairy tales. Dramatized on screen, the film gives the audience a glimpse into the most important organ of the human body, one that goes on dreaming, loving and hurting long after the rest of the body has given up on life.

It was an interesting premise, but I just could not warm to the character.

I think part of it was that in the early part of the film, we did not see enough of his past life to really have a sense of all that he has lost.

Maybe the suggestion was that he was always 'locked in' but it took too long to make it.

Although it might sound strange to say, we did not see things enough from his point of view and emotions. I mean, we have a camera lens supposed to be his one good eye, and his sarcastic comments, but there is no real stream of consciousness or even much emotion.

I tried it on the basis of a friend's recommendation but it was too weighty even for me, who normally loves foreign films.

****1/2

Because film is a largely realistic medium, "impressionism" is a style rarely attempted by even the most adventurous of moviemakers. Indeed, Terrance Malick is one of the few directors working today who has found consistent success (artistic if not commercial) in that genre. Now we can add French filmmaker Julian Schnabel to the list for his truly remarkable work in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," a movie that defies easy categorization and is quite unlike anything we've encountered before.

The story definitely falls into the "truth is stranger than fiction" category. Jean-Dominique Bauby was a 43-year-old writer and editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine when, in 1995, he suffered a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed in all but his left eye. Confined to a bed and a wheelchair and unable to speak or move, all Bauby could do was look out on the world around him without any real hope of ever being able to communicate beyond a simple batting of the eyelid in response to a string of "yes or no" questions. However, thanks to the ingenuity of one of his therapists, Bauby eventually found a way - by painstakingly spelling out each word one letter at a time - to not only communicate fully with those around him but to actually dictate an entire best-selling book with the use of his one eye.

For the first twenty minutes or so, we see the world only as Bauby does, from the severely limited viewpoint of his one good eye, as he wakes up from his coma and begins to slowly realize what has happened to him. As the story progresses, Schnabel gradually allows us to escape Bauby's bodily prison and to see the events from a more objective angle. From that point on, we split our time fairly evenly between these two perspectives.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" could have been a mere "gimmick film" were it not for the tremendously revelatory nature of Bauby's tale. Through voiceover narration, we are able to enter into Bauby`s mind to explore the many thoughts and moods that enlighten or plague him. At first, of course, Bauby is filled with a sense of hopelessness and despair, telling his therapist early on that the one thing he wishes for above all else is death. However, as time goes on, Bauby begins to realize that, while his body may be trapped in a physical prison (a diving bell), his mind is now free to soar as never before into the realm of fantasy, imagination and memory (the butterfly). Forced to remove himself from the petty concerns that so often overtake us in our daily lives, Bauby is now able to contemplate the things that REALLY matter in life, principally, what it means to be a partner to his girlfriend, a father to his children, and a son to his aged father. As such, the movie becomes a celebration of the ability of the human spirit to endure and flourish under even the most trying of circumstances. The impressionism comes as Schnabel follows the course of Bauby's dreams, visions, memories and imaginings as they come pouring out in virtual stream-of-consciousness fashion, always backed up by Bauby's lyrical contemplation on what they mean to him both as an individual and as a part of the collective human race.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a movie overflowing with imagination and surprise, as when, out of nowhere, Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood insert a lovely little homage to the opening scene in "The 400 Blows." Conversely, the scene in which Bauby has his right eye sewn shut against his unheeded wishes is quite literally harrowing. Indeed, the movie is often at its most poignant in scenes where Bauby is completely at the mercy of what other people think is best for him, as when an unthinking orderly turns off a soccer match just as Bauby is really getting into it or a well-meaning therapist takes Bauby, an avowed atheist, to visit a Catholic priest. It is at times like these that he is closest to having his identity as an individual subsumed by his illness and the people around him.

Beyond the brilliant performances by Mathieu Amallic as Bauby, Max von Sydow as his 92-year-old father, and Emmanuelle Seigner as his longtime girlfriend, among others, special recognition must surely go to editor Juliette Welfling and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Spielberg's preferred cameraman) for the various miracles they have wrought in bringing this tightrope-walking tour-de-force to the screen.

Heartbreaking but never sentimental, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is that rare film that will haunt you for a long time after it's over and will make you look at life in a whole new way.

This is one of those very touching, soul searching stories that often causes the viewer to re-examine the priorities in their own lives. The true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who knew little about failure and lived life in the fast lane, takes an unfortunate turn when a paralyzing stroke tragically takes that life away from him and leaves Bauby imprisoned in his own body. His struggle to come to terms with 'locked in syndrome' is heart wrenching. Only able to move one eyelid, Bauby dictates his memoir through a special alphabet worked out with a therapist. The slow Morse code Bauby uses to dictate and communicate is a testimony to the amazing strength of patience and perseverance. Amazing story!

Chrissy K. McVay - Author

Imagine being left immobilized after a massive stroke, and having the ability to move only your left eye. Such was the case of 43-year-old French Elle magazine editor-in-chief Jean-Dominique Bauby in December 1995 when he awakened from a twenty-day coma to find himself mentally active but physically paralyzed. To think he would have the wherewithal to write a poignant and elegant memoir through the blink of his eye is astounding, but he did it and the publication date of his book was a mere two days before his death in 1997. It takes someone with painter/filmmaker Julian Schnabel's (Before Night Falls) visual flair to bring such a fragile but empowering story to cinematic life, and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) has done a compelling job translating Bauby's book into a highly charged story that complements Schnabel's bold filmmaking choices.

The 2007 film begins with Bauby, known as Jean-Do to his friends, slipping in and out of consciousness, slowly realizing he has his faculties but cannot communicate with is doctors. The first half-hour shows only Bauby's viewpoint with his thoughts articulated through an interior monologue shared with the viewer. It's an intentionally constricted technique that Schnabel uses effectively to convey Bauby's helpless state. Four women play pivotal roles in his road toward at least partial recovery - speech therapist Henriette, who teaches him the blinking technique that enables him to communicate; physiotherapist Marie who demonstrates a series of tongue exercises that sets Bauby off on some hilariously profane thoughts; his estranged partner Céline who bore and raised his three children and is now willing to take on the role of caretaker; and finally Claude, the editor who has come to take dictation for the book Bauby promised to his publisher before his stroke. These encounters are intertwined with fantasy sequences and flashbacks where we see the fully functional Bauby. There are an excellent couple of scenes between Bauby and his curmudgeonly father that shows just how much son takes after father and how vibrant and flawed Bauby was before his paralysis.

The acting is outstanding beginning with Mathieu Amalric (the informant Louis in Steven Spielberg's Munich) as Bauby. In a powerful, unsentimental performance that recalls the exalted levels achieved by Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside, the French actor conveys the fertile brain at work and the vibrant man that has been forcibly left behind. Amalric also shows how human-sized his character is, a philanderer who still manages to engender the devotion of those closest to him. The actresses playing the women - Marie-Josée Croze, Olatz Lopez Garmendia (Schnabel's real-life wife), Emmanuelle Seigner, and Anne Consigny -are all strong if a bit interchangeable. The legendary Max Von Sydow steals his brief scenes as Bauby's homebound father. There is masterful work by Spielberg's longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiñski (his latest work is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) seamlessly alternating between the reality and fantasy aspects of the narrative.

It is a remarkable film that on the surface, appears to focus on the traumatic effects of sensory deprivation, but evolves into a triumph of an eloquent soul yearning to share life's often harsh lessons with the world. Four bonus features are included in the 2008 DVD. The first is a standard, thirteen-minute making-of featurette, "Submerged: The Making of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" featuring the principal cast and crew as they share their thoughts on the production under Schnabel's direction. The second is the shorter "A Cinematic Vision", which describes what was done to convey Bauby's first-person point of view during the first part of the film. There is also a twenty-minute Charlie Rose interview with Schnabel from 2007, which turns out to be a lot more informative than the director's audio commentary on the film. Schnabel is disappointingly reticent with his observations, and it would have been good to have someone like Amalric or Harwood available to prompt greater insights. Regardless, it's a fine package for such an accomplished film. By the way, the diving bell of the title is refers to Bauby's horrendous physical limitations, and the butterfly represents his fertile imagination.

I think I needed more understanding of who he was, what his life was like, before the stroke, and locked in syndrome, to really engage with the film and not just watch it. I normally love intelligent films with engaging narrative but this was so much like 'navel-gazing' by the director, I felt locked out.

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' directed by Julian Schnabel, is a fantastic French film. It's about Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) , who was editor for French 'Elle' magazine, and who, in 1995, had a massive stroke, which left him totally paralysed. How Almaric conveys the 'feeling of claustrophobia and not make it a depressing experience is just extraordinary'. However, Bauby can move his left eyelid, and this is how he communicates with his therapist, and over time he writes his memoir. It's a powerful and poignant film with much pathos, but with elements of humour, too. What I found particularly interesting about the film, was not only the story, but the cinematography. Most of the scenes are presented from Bauby's point of view, and the way the camera does this is nothing short of brilliant, as well as the use of flashbacks to tell his story. All this added to the complexity and depth of this film. Highly recommended.

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.