Jean-Dominique Bauby wakes up in a hospital in Berck-sur-Mer and is informed by the doctor he had a stroke and is paralyzed completely, due to locked-in syndrome. Jean-Dominique can only communicate through his left eye, and two women, speech therapist Henriette and physical therapist Marie, devise a system of spelling aloud and waiting for him to blink for a specific letter. He was editor of Elle magazine, had a relationship with Celine with whom he had two kids, but left her for an affair with Ines. He thus decides to write a memoir about his life, recorded by his assistant. He had the stroke randomly while driving his son in a car, so he stopped on the road. Jean-Dominique dies from pneumonia ten days after his book is published, aged 44.
After Amenabar's "The Sea Inside", the director Julian Schnabel took on an even bigger challenge of crafting a film around a paralyzed man who can only blink with his left eye in this film. That Schnabel is able to pull it through is already incredible: he does so much from so little at his disposal. His biopic based on true events, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a film that is depicted in 2/3 of its running time only through the point-of-view of the protagonist Jean-Dominique Bauby, and thus his subjective perspective becomes the film's perspective—meaning that the actor playing him, Mathieu Amalric, is not seen on the screen for the majority of the film. The opening 10 minutes are the most powerful, as a doctor looks into the "foggy" camera in a hospital and asks for the patient's name. Jean-Dominique says his name, but the doctor asks his name again, and again, until the protagonist realizes he cannot speak, and that his words are only his thoughts. Jean-Dominique can only blink with his left eye—one blink means "yes", two blinks mean "no", shown again through his POV as the camera's screen "goes black" for a second—but two women therapists patiently spell out loud until he blinks at a specific letter, and they then write it down on paper, bit by bit, until a sentence is formed. As one woman reads out a sentence from Jean-Dominique's planned memoir, he cynically thinks to himself that they "spent five hours" just to complete it. Throughout the film, flashbacks of Jean-Dominique's life before the stroke are shown, combined with lyrical-poetic sequences of him imagining himself in a diving bell suit under the sea to illustrate his feeling of helplessness and fragility (among others, he is annoyed when a medic turns off the TV in his room just as he was watching a football match). "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a very good contemplation on how bad life can get, asking us to be thankful for what health we have, but "The Sea Inside" is still better due to a much richer movie language used: the former is a monologue, the latter is a dialogue. One of those movies that are almost too depressing to watch for some viewers.
Grade:+++
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