Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The

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Jean-Dominique Bauby lived a life of glamour. As the editor of the French fashion magazine ELLE, he was one of the movers and shakers in Paris. But all movement stopped for him in 1995, when at the young age of 43 he was felled by a massive stroke. When he came out of a coma weeks later, doctors told him it should have killed him. But it didn't. Instead, the stroke left him with a rare condition called "Locked-in Syndrome," where his mind was untouched but the brain stem was destroyed, leaving his entire body paralyzed except for one eye. But he had a book contract and the determination to meet his obligation by working with a translator in order to write a memoir, one letter at a time. That memoir, published in translation as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, became the basis for this award-winning film.

It's no wonder the script by Ron Harwood appealed to director Julian Schnabel. Before getting into film, Schnabel lived a life much like Bauby's. As a neo-expressionist artist, he moved in the same sort of artsy, high-society party circles as Bauby, and like Bauby he had a congenial relationship with the mother of his children.

I've heard critics call this film "uplifting," and it is, to the extent that Bauby is only briefly suicidal. And certainly, his interior chorus of regrets makes one want to live every day to the fullest and strive hard to avoid hurting others--because human contact is still the most basic need that all of us have. Bauby also maintains his sense of humor, and that's a positive thing. But it's a sad film with more "diving bell" than "butterfly" moments.

The diving bell is Bauby's waking dream of himself so isolated and contained, as if he were groping undersea while wearing an apparatus that allows him to breathe, and little else. The butterfly? A metaphor for/from his beautiful speech therapist, who works with him to make the most of his life and to cherish life no matter what form it takes. But uplifting? If there can be a positive film about incapacitation and the loss of everything held dear, I suppose this comes as close as any. But the problem is, how do you convey tedium and depression without being tedious and depressing?

Stylistically, Schnabel made a number of key decisions. Harwood's adapted screenplay was in English, but the director insisted on doing the film in French with English subtitles to draw closer to Bauby's world. Since this is a film about reclaiming language, that's appropriate. And he made the decision to position viewers in Bauby's point of view, so that we see what he sees: blurs, shapes, people, doctors, curtains slanted in sunlight. Like the hero from "Johnny Got His Gun," Bauby learns about his condition bit by bit. First, he realizes he's in a hospital and that they cannot hear him speak; next, he realizes that he's not in Paris, but in Berck-sur-Mer, a place he associates with sadness because as a child it was the train station at Berck that took him away from his summer holidays back to school. A doctor tells him that he was in a coma and he remembers the stroke. Then, finally, he gets the full diagnosis from a neurologist: that he's completely paralyzed, "a vegetable," one of his friends tells him people are saying.

In a way, this is a film about friendship and caring as much as anything else. Bauby quickly learns who was a friend (or lover) of convenience and who was one of commitment. The lover he left his significant other for never shows up to visit him at the hospital. But the woman he hurt, the mother of his children does. And it's clear that Céline (Emmanuelle Singer) didn't deserve the pain he inflicted on her, nor did his young children (Théo Sampaio, Fiorella Campanella, Talina Boyaci). Only two friends show up, one who took his seat on an airplane that was hijacked, and who spent the next four years in a prison in Beruit--a friend he never visited after he was released. And his father, 92 years old and unable to leave his apartment, calls him by phone to tell him he loves him and that they're in the same boat. All of the advice resonates around the same thing his imprisoned friend told him: Hold fast to the human inside you, and you'll survive.

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