The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon)

A series of blurry and distorted images of medical personnel unfolds, and after a short time they respond to the viewer of these images, reassuring him and telling him he's been in a coma. The patient, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) answers the questions asked of him but soon realises that he cannot be heard and therefore cannot speak - the voice we hear is the voice of his thoughts. This point-of-view nightmare continues, with a well-intentioned neurologist (Patrick Chesnais) informing Bauby - or 'Jean-Do' as he is known to his friends - that he's completely paralysed following a massive stroke, though the fact that he retains full sentience is understood - a condition known as 'locked-in syndrome'. The only way Jean-Do can communicate is by blinking his one functioning eye, the left - one blink for 'yes' and two for 'no' - which is put across by the picture closing and opening, one time or two.

This style of total immersement in Jean-Do's condition is arresting and extremely effective from the outset and as the film opens out, the style does likewise. What comes across so strongly is the horror of not being able to make any existential impact on the living of one's own life, remaining at the mercy of the flux of events. So when a doctor comes to sew up Jean-Do's dry right eye, to prevent infection, we hear his useless protests over the doctor's account of a skiing holiday, watching from the inside as the stitches go in and the pink lids are harnessed together forever. Similarly when he has a fly on his nose or an orderly turns off the TV in the middle of a football match, he can do nothing except feel helpless.


With speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), Jean-Do learns to broaden his communicating by blinking to signify a letter of the alphabet and so spell words. Eventually he writes a whole book this way - the memoir on which the film is based. This isn't quite as impossibly onerous as it sounds, as the alphabet is arranged in order of frequency of use, and after a couple of letters a word can often be guessed, in the manner of predictive texting. But far from being a joyful breakthrough, the first piece of information Jean-Do imparts provokes a heartbreakingly sad moment - one of many in this excellent film.

Having found his voice, so to speak, Jean-Do starts to articulate his inner world, using the metaphors of the piece's title - the diving bell representing his condition and the butterfly his imagination, free to roam wherever. Over more optimistic, strident voice-over, the butterfly emerges from its chrysalis and flies off into a sequence of overlapping, evanescent imagery. In this world of beauty, Jean-Do lives out boyhood dreams, travels to far-flung places and conjectures the rich history of his hospital in Berck, where Nijinski may well have once danced. Conversely the locked-in side of the equation is dramatised by murky underwater shots of Jean-Do in an old fashioned diving suit, complete with large spherical metal helmet (in French 'scaphandre' means 'suit' rather than 'bell').


At this same moment, the film breaks away from being centred around Jean-Do's point-of-view and we get objective shots of him in bed and in his wheelchair, faced locked in a lugubrious expression, mouth twisted down in one corner and left eye frantically busy with its excessive workload. What a shocking contrast this makes with the flashback-memory sequences of Jean-Do before the catastrophe, when he was the flamboyant editor of Elle magazine, drove an open top Jaguar and was evidently a ladies' man. His somewhat messy love life is further complicated by his condition. Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), his ex-partner and mother of his children, has the difficult and thankless job of being his main conduit with the outside world, but a former girlfriend also lurks, adding to the emotional stress. Indomitable in this area, Jean-Do forms a new attachment to Claude (Anne Consigny), the editor tasked with taking his dictation for the memoir and this relationship too becomes part of his butterfly world.

The acting is first class throughout, with Mathieu Amalric perfect as Bauby, remaining just a vocal presence in the early stretches, but the way he delivers the lines says it all. An aged Max von Sydow is on great form as Bauby's father, in his nineties, frail and mildly senile, and the pain he exhibits at the sudden role reversal, where his son is now more infirm than him, is another of those gripping moments of real tragedy. The ways in which this relationship is affected by illness on both sides prompts Jean-Do into an examination of how his children must see him and his reflections are truly enlightening.


Despite its subject matter, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is ultimately uplifting and spirit-freeing, and ranks among the very best serious illness dramas, comparable to The Singing Detective and The English Patient. It demonstrates how vibrant and cutting edge French cinema is today, and so it's notable that its director, Julian Schnabel, isn't French but an American of Czech extraction. Though he's made two films before, Schnabel is first and foremost a top New York painter rather than a filmmaker, and doesn't it show on screen! The daring adventurousness and artistic verve with which he approaches the project are such a refreshing change from either solid conventional filmmaking or pretentious experimentalism that isn't rooted in a valid vision. He literally does 'paint' Bauby's world with film, and Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's regular cinematographer, similarly puts on butterfly wings and makes the camera fly, not only in the locked-in and imaginary sequences but also in conveying, for example, the exhilaration of driving around Paris in a convertible. To Schnabel's credit, he resisted pressure to make the film in English, and luckily, so it would seem in retrospect - and no offence intended! - Johnny Depp was too busy with Pirates to take up the offer of the lead role. Schnabel says that above all he wanted authenticity and he certainly achieved that. I'll be very surprised if I see a better film this year, and I urge you to sample this unique cinematic experience.