If there is one word which best describes Julian Schnabel’s latest film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, to the audience standing in line to purchase tickets, the word would be “painful”: painful for the story’s protagonist and his supporting characters, but also painful for the audience watching the film. For its entire 112 minutes, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly constantly pushes and challenges the various thresholds of the audience’s patience and pain receptors. The winner is the spectator who will have passed the test by sitting through the entire 1 hour and 52 minutes with courageous patience from one moment to the next, ending at last with a harrowed but yet redeemed soul and spirit by the film’s final end.

A potential invitation to being labeled an “art-film” from the start, The Diving Bell And the Butterfly begins with a voice-over and a medium shot from the inside of an opening. There is a blur with this glance, but it gradually clears up. Outside the opening we hear voices and see close-ups of doctors looking straight into the camera. The camera standing in place of the eye surveys the different faces and bodies, while the white-coated doctors deliver their diagnosis. The functioning eye  we learn that it is the left eye  can move left, right, up and down, and the eyelids can open and close, but the rest of the body, save the brain and the ears, have lost all their functionality: dead.

The person whose one-eyed world we have been witnessing has, for all intent and purposes, become a vegetable, a motionless cadaver. The main doctor, Dr. Lepage, played with an extraordinary sense of compassion and conviction by Patrick Chesnais, comes close to the camera  the left eye  and speaks directly to it. He tells the patient that he is suffering from a rare condition called Locked-In Syndrome and explains the symptoms. Eye-to-eye and face-to-face, we hear the doctor explain that there is no cure for the condition, but the hospital and its staff will try their best. He smiles and walks away. With this despairing but yet hopeful note, the psychological drama begins to be told through the mind, ears and the left eye of a 43-year old man named Jean-Dominique Bauby, played by Mathieu Amalric. The film is based on the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952-1997) as depicted in his autobiography, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (published as Le Scaphandre et le Papillon in France in 1997).

The first five minutes can be painful and frustrating to watch, and you may opt to walk out of the theatre. However, if seen as a cinematic challenge - with basic questions such as, “How is the director going to tell the story, sustain it, and avoid turning it into a clichéd pseudo art film  then your curiosity will ask you to stay and watch, not only painfully, but rather very closely and carefully. In one of the early scenes, the doctor sews Jean-Dominique’s non-functional right eye and we hear Jean-Dominique cringe and cry out to the doctor in the silence of his body’s prison. From the eye’s perspective, we see the needle come close to the eyeball, stitch, and then sew the eyelids shut. The pain, sometimes physical, sometimes psychological, often remains on the psycho-emotional plane for Jean-Dominique, or “Jean-Do” as his friends called him. He is a thinking vegetable: unable to move his body parts, with only the left eye capable of rolling up and down and moving left to right, and blinking eyelids as the sole means of communication.

This prisoner’s forced confinement proves to be more frustrating and torturous than imagined as the simple moments and tasks usually taken for granted in daily life become monumental efforts. At one point, while watching a soccer game on television, the hospital attendant, oblivious to the silent, motionless body on the bed, changes the channel. We hear the internal screaming objection and plea of Jean-Dominique, but he cannot shout it out and be heard: “Don’t change the channel!” The words of objection by his unheard voice travel out only to himself and within himself. There is no one who can hear him. A body with a mind that cannot speak and a body that cannot move turns into the horror of imprisoned isolation.

The film continues with its cinematic challenge. Aware of all that surrounds him, the pain of Locked-In Syndrome gains a metaphysical dimension for Jean-Dominque when the motionless body begins to have family and friends come to visit. As with the doctors and therapists speaking to Jean-Do in the opening scene, Schnabel introduces each person first with a close-up portrait of their face speaking directly to the camera - the stand-in for Jean-Do’s functioning left eye. We see Jean-Dominique’s wife, or as he refers to her, “the mother of my children,” gazing at him with a distressed look, yet speaking with a hopeful smile. Crying, she asks if he wants to see the children; and, after much struggle, Jean-Do agrees. Rooted in a real identity – a father of three children – he thinks about how his children will receive him. As he questions the visit, his thoughts are answered when his three children and their mother show up. The face is recognizable: it’s Jean-Dominque their father and he too recognizes the children, two girls and one boy. In line with the tender moments we’ve encountered before - the intimate rapport between the therapists, doctors and Jean-Do - the film picks up once again with sparks of hope and new signs of life. For a 112- minute invitation to a contemplative scenario with audio and visual restrictions, the scene with new characters and visitors act as a break, a momentary relief from the distraught vertigo of imprisoned life.

The film then cuts from the interior of the hospital to the exterior of the oceanfront, in a scene that is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s cinema and aesthetic, in particular his 1973 autobiography Amarcord. The three children, their mother and Jean-Do in his wheelchair are now all gathered at the ocean side. What is the “out-side” of Jean-Do’s interior locked-up world? What is clearly a bittersweet moment between the reunited family, becomes even more poignant when the scene is complemented by Tom Waits’ scruffy and nostalgic voice singing the waltz  “All the World is Green.” We hear Tom Waits’ nostalgic waltz sing the poetry of love today and the past, “you have turned kings into beggars… beggars into kings….we can bring back the old days again…when all the world was green” alongside Schnabel’s visual long shots of the children playing ball with each other and their mother joining them. All the while, on the side by himself, Jean-Dominique is positioned on the side, so as to be able to watch them.

Perhaps one of the most painful moments of the film, the scene climaxes when the pain becomes too unbearable for the son to watch his father in his current state and he breaks out in tears as his mother holds him in her arms and consoles him. The ocean is blue and calm and peaceful and Jean-Do watches from his wheelchair. The scene, as beautiful and painful as it has remained from its start, continues to be relentless in its pain-giving moments until the end: as the children say goodbye to their father, an interior monologue of Jean-Do is heard, speaking about himself in a self-deprecating manner. Eventually the children say goodbye to their father, one by one and the film moves on to show some of Jean-Do’s friends visiting him. “Cling to what is human in you Jean-Do, and then you’ll survive,” declares one of his friends. The pain persists, back in his room, when Jean-Do’s home-ridden father (played by one of Ingmar Bergman’s favorite theatre and film actors, Max von Sydow), speaks to him and against his will breaks down and cries, articulating: “We are in the same predicament… You are a prisoner inside your body, I am a prisoner in my house.” We hear this tender father-and-son exchange followed by a memory of Jean-Do shaving his father.

With a screenplay by Ronald Harwood based on Jean-Dominique’s autobiography Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, Schnabel’s film manages to create a fascinating world out of memories and imagination, the real and the surreal.  How close this world is with the real Jean-Dominique’s, there is no way of ever knowing. What we can know from the film’s version of the autobiography is that the spirit of perseverance and hope are perhaps the greatest human antidote to death, despair, and spiritual blindness. With the film’s technical limitations installed and at work from the beginning, what saves the film from becoming an exercise in strict formal cinematography, is the film’s life created before the camera by the actors chronicling one miraculous turn of events after another. The greatest one being the full endorsement and dedication of the hospital’s whole medical team, on board all one hundred percent for Jean-Dominique, actively encouraging and pushing Jean-Do to take a step out of his imprisonment. Watching this unity of humans for life through cinematographer Janusz Kaninski’s close-ups compels the viewer to weigh the forced silence of Jean-Dominque against the sound of the determined solidarity for life and against the slow haunting descent into the oblivion.

Not expecting a miracle to take place, the camera continues to take us through the life of the one-eyed patient, until a break in the action freezes the camera on the bedside. A young beautiful face looks at Jean-Do with a smile. Much like a spring breeze, it is a very definitive break in the montage. Perhaps a miracle is about to take place? The young speech therapist, Henriette, played with genuine human warmth by Marie-Josée Coroze, has a proposal to make. Rearranging the letters of the alphabet in the order of their frequency for usage, she has devised a special system of spelling words and communicating which enables Jean-Dominique to finally communicate with the outside (out-of-his-body) world. Slowly, she reads the alphabet and when a letter is reached that he wants, he blinks his eye. They then move to the next letter, and gradually a word is spelled out.  It is with this system, and the cooperation of all others at the hospital, that Jean-Dominique finally begins to open up and “talk” to the world around and outside his imprisoned body.

As if a rebirth or a resurrection, the acquisition of this new language suddenly gives Jean-Do a second burst of energy and life. Recalling that he has a contract to write a book, he calls his editor and inquires about the contract he had signed. To his editor’s astonishment, he insists on writing the book and completing the contract. To do so, he asks for a full-time secretary to take down the words letter by letter.  And so, with the aid of an assistant he sets out to dictate his book letter by letter. The rest of the film focuses on Jean-Dominique’s memories, imagination, and the writing of his book. The book takes one year to write and is dedicated to his three children and with special thanks to the assistant who transcribed the words. Jean-Dominique dies days after the publication of the book. The triumph of the human spirit over the weight of the deafening gravity becomes the center of his memoirs. Taken from the prologue, where he writes, “My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly,” Jean-Dominique’s title highlights his embracing of life and his final freedom.

As a post scriptum: it is important to note the film was the winner of the Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Whether it is a good film, a great film, a masterpiece or not, does not really matter. What really matters is the feat Schnabel set out to accomplish and how he managed to accomplish it. With the dearth of imagination, intelligence, and originality prevailing in much of today’s cinema screens, such a risk and challenge is worthy of attention if not applause. With Max von Sydow as the father, the meticulous cinematography of Janusz Kaninski, the humane portrayal of a compassionate speech therapist by Marie-Josée Croze, and a well-chosen and composed soundtrack, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,more than anything, stands strong as a lyrical poem.

© Electronic Communications from the International Brecht Society: ECIBS 36.1 (Winter 2008)