ON CIRCUIT: Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, as well as The Game Plan and The Spiderwick Chronicles.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Nothing in director Julian Schnabel’s career so far has anticipated the sweetness, sadness, maturity and restraint of this lovely movie. It is a very moving and deeply satisfying version of the bestselling 1997 memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the 43-year-old Parisian fashion editor who, at the height of wealth, health and success, was paralysed by a stroke and suffered from ‘locked-in syndrome”. He could hear and see perfectly, but could not move or speak. The thing he could do was blink his left eyelid and, with ferocious effort, learned to blink in a special alphabet-code and by this means ‘dictate” his extraordinary memoir.
Armed with Ronald Harwood’s robust screenplay, Schnabel has applied his visual sense to create a distinctive look and feel for his movie, part magic lantern, part hallucinatory fuzz, a watery depth from which float up memories and reveries, fantastical constructions and visions. It is only in the past and in fantasy that Bauby can escape his condition. Schnabel moves with seamless assurance from Bauby’s agonised, bedridden point-of-view to the third-person camera positions showing us the ruined invalid. A triumph of responsive, creative intelligence. — Peter Bradshaw