The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

This review was written for the festival screening of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

Overall Grade A must watch movie!







CANNES -- Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have performed a small miracle in adapting for the screen Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Not, of course, as much as the one it took for the former "Elle" editor to write the book when he was paralyzed from head to toe and could communicate only by blinking his left eye.


But their film does justice to the enormous courage and determination of the man and the caring patience of those who helped him. Taking a very different approach to the award-winning 2004 Spanish film "The Sea Inside," in which Javier Bardem played a suicidal quadriplegic, the movie boasts an equally fine lead performance, by Mathieu Amalric, and matches that film's broad appeal.

A vivacious and charismatic magazine editor, Bauby is stricken at 43 with the cerebro-vascular incident that first plunges him into a coma and then leaves him with what is called "locked-in syndrome." His brain works perfectly but his body doesn't, save the left eye. It is from that eye's point-of-view that the film is almost entirely told and Janusz Kaminski's cinematography does marvels in suggesting the suffocating horror of Bauby's predicament and the wide variety of images that bring him joy and hope.

A brief period of self-pity is overcome by the painstaking attention of his therapists, Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze) and Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia), who develop the pattern whereby he blinks at letters of the alphabet in order to form words and then sentences. Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his three children, whom he had abandoned shortly before he had his stroke, also nurses him devotedly. Among many scenes of tender mercy, she translates when Bauby's new lover calls to speak to him only to say that she cannot bear to see him in his current state. Celine must translate his blinking reply: "Each day I wait for you."