Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for nudity, sensuality and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.1.08
The blurry, eye-blinking, where-am-I point of view scene has been a cinema cliché for decades, as countless directors have put us briefly into a protagonist's head while s/he struggles to consciousness.
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| Here's the moment we spend the entire film waiting to see: Claude (Anne Consigny) holds the completed book that she and Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) have spent painstaking months to "dictate" and transcribe. |
The next image is equally inevitable: the gradually sharpening close-up of a smiling lover, a worried doctor or a smirking villain. Then standard movie technique resumes, and we're once again in the land of multiple cameras and standard establishing shots.
Not for director Julian Schnabel.
He opens his new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, with just such a sequence, as Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, perhaps remembered as the French information broker in Munich) battles for awareness after having been in a three-week coma. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski — a two-time Academy Award winner, for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan — metaphorically places his camera inside Bauby's skull; we therefore share the man's disorientation as doctors, nurses and orderlies swim in and out of focus.
But it doesn't stop: Schnabel maintains this harrowing point of view, trapping us within Bauby's head just as he was, in reality, fully cognizant while being entombed within his own body.
This is a true story, and far more faithful to actual fact than most films making that claim these days. Bauby was a 43-year-old author and editor of the leading French magazine, Elle, when he was felled by a massive stroke. All at once, his exciting lifestyle — devoted father to adoring children, loving son to his own aging father, new boyfriend to a sensuous young woman quite typical of his glamorous world — came to an abrupt halt.
Bauby hit one of Fate's cruelest jackpots: He recovered consciousness to learn that he was victimized by an extremely rare condition known as "locked-in syndrome." Almost completely paralyzed, he nonetheless quickly regained his sensibilities but had no way of caring for himself, and almost no way of communicating with the world outside his own thoughts.
He could flutter his left eyelid. That was it.
