Le scaphandre et le papillon/The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I first fell in love with Julian Schnabel after seeing Basquiat. The film featured countless cameos (Parker Posey, Courtney Love, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper and more), as well as remarkable performances by Jeffrey Wright and Benicio Del Toro. I had always admired Basquiat’s work, the film only furthered my admiration. I fell in love with Schnabel all over again when I saw his artwork at a museum. He creates abstract paintings in a style reminiscent of Pollock and Picasso — “I’m the closest thing to Picasso that you’ll see in this *#@ life,” he once said. Schnabel is also the mastermind behind Before Night Falls, the story of Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban poet who was persecuted for his homosexuality and subversive writing during the Cuban Communist Revolution. Schnabel’s films have a common thread — not only do they tell stories of great artists, but they provide the viewer with uniquely ethereal experiences.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is no different. It is, in my opinion, Schnabel’s most sophisticated film yet. In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the 43 year-old Editor of the French Elle Magazine, suffered a massive stroke that put him in a coma and left his entire body paralyzed. When he awoke, over twenty days later, he was diagnosed with Locked-in Syndrome — his left eye was the only muscle he could move. Bauby gradually learned to communicate with this eye. With a simple blink he would confirm a letter which would spell a word. Although Bauby engaged in speech and physical therapy, he never regained movement, or use of his tongue. In two summer months of 1996, Bauby wrote a book, with the help of a transcriber. “The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and each word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events and what they are like for a person with locked-in syndrome,” states Wikipedia. Schnabel’s film is based on this book. We watch as Bauby struggles to communicate. We see him visit his children. We see him cry. “The French edition of the book was published in March, 1997. It received excellent reviews and sold 150,000 copies in the first week and went on to become a number one bestseller across Europe. Ten days after the book was published, Bauby died of pneumonia” (also from Wikipedia).

Salon wrote, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly suggests — perhaps it even proves — that our capacity for joy, and our ability to process it through whatever senses are available to us, are more durable than we think. In his book, Bauby wrote about how although his ability to hear the outside world had been somewhat impaired, the hearing inside his head had changed dramatically. He wrote of being aware of the butterflies ‘that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: My hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing.’”

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a poetic, yet true, interpretation of Bauby’s memoir. It is artisticly mezmorizing and emotionally challenging.