the-diving-bell-and-the-butterfly-1

Looking back on this still-young century makes clear that 2007 was a major time for cinematic happenings — and, on the basis of this retrospective, one we’re not quite through with ten years on. One’s mind might quickly flash to a few big titles that will be represented, but it is the plurality of both festival and theatrical premieres that truly surprises: late works from old masters, debuts from filmmakers who’ve since become some of our most-respected artists, and mid-career turning points that didn’t necessarily announce themselves as such at the time. Join us as an assembled team, many of whom were coming of age that year, takes on their favorites.

Has there ever been a more perfect pairing of medium and story than Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Cinema, an optical art form whose audience views scenes that they are powerless to change, here emulates the first-person perspective of the true-life Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Almaric), a man who, after suffering a stroke, was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome. This extremely rare disorder causes head-to-toe paralysis, leaving only sight, hearing, and thought unaffected. In other words, Bauby was condemned to viewing his life as a movie, flashing before his eyes in vibrant, fleeting moments he couldn’t touch.

Eventually, Bauby’s speech therapists developed a system of communication where letters would be read aloud and he would blink when the right letter was said. In this manner, he was gradually able to spell out words, sentences, and, eventually, the book on which the film was based. Success came slowly, however, with minor triumphs often feeling futile next to the absurd agony of his debilitated, day-to-day existence, and it is the full gamut of Bauby’s experience that the film seeks to capture.

Ingeniously, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does so by recreating what it would have been like to actually see the world through Bauby’s eyes. Beyond merely getting a standard POV shot, it places the viewer not just in Bauby’s general position in space but behind his eyelids. We see his eyelashes, the blurriness that results from tears or squinting, and, as a doctor shines a flashlight into his retina, the soft glow of the surrounding flesh being illuminated. When an infected eye has to be sewn shut, we watch how each additional stitch darkens the frame, shutting out the light to which Bauby desperately clings.

As we see what Bauby sees, we also hear his thoughts, which are presented in gloriously snarky voiceover to signal a man who, though physically immobile, is very much bursting with loud and lusty life. The guy can’t move, but he swears, he sasses, and even gets horny. (Rarely has the male gaze been applied so self-consciously in film.) Narratively, it makes sense for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to also enter Bauby’s mind, to follow through completely on the film’s commitment to empathy, except the act of letting a paralyzed man narrate his own story is also a notably rare case in cinema of giving both literal and figurative voice to a disabled character. Though certainly sympathetic towards Bauby’s predicament, the film treats him not as an object of pity but rather a fiercely intelligent and engaging narrator capable of outstripping many of his able-bodied counterparts in wit and charisma.

That said, neither does The Diving Bell and the Butterfly swing too far in the other direction — it doesn’t turn Bauby into a prince simply to compensate for his misfortune. The man has screwed up a lot — mostly in the domain of relationships — and the wreckage of his bad decisions is on full display for both us and him to see. It is precisely his paralysis that compels a reckoning with the past; unable to move or run, he is forced to watch when previous mistakes catch up with him. In a wrenching scene, Céline (Emmanuelle Singer), the mother of his children, ends up mediating a romantic exchange between the paralyzed Bauby and one of his lovers — who is on the phone, because there are no other nurses around and he cannot speak. Through moments like these, it is clear that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t letting Bauby off the hook, but neither does it revel in schadenfreude. The film bluntly confronts the man’s shortcomings, but its heart still has space for him.

Compassion of this sort drives the film — both implicitly in the camera’s identification with Bauby’s perspective, and more explicitly through the numerous supporting players who shoulder the burden of loving and caring for Bauby with Herculean strength and selflessness. From the speech therapists to Bauby’s father to the woman tasked with translating eye blinks into words for Bauby’s memoir, the people in this film are large-souled to an extent that is deeply moving without becoming unrealistic. They exhibit patience and tenderness but never condescension, treating Bauby like the mentally capable man he is while also fully accommodating his disability. The simple but deep poignancy of observing kindness in action is enhanced by the fact that we, in a sense, inhabit Bauby’s body, thanks to the first-person POV. Thus, most of the other characters’ considerate actions appear to be made in our direction as if we were the recipients, a mode of viewing that makes each kind gesture feel more personal. Moreover, although the film is about Bauby’s perspective, his friends, family members, and caretakers are the ones being “depicted” in the conventional sense of the word i.e. shown onscreen. By becoming more “about” Bauby through adopting his vantage point, the film simultaneously becomes more about those around him. His experience is the focus of the movie, but so is their love.

Despite spending most of its runtime emulating Bauby’s gaze upon the material world around him, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly departs from this perspective in two crucial ways. The first is a shift to a third-person view of Bauby, wherein we see his immobile body as the other characters do, frozen atop a hospital bed or in a wheelchair. These scenes are essential to the film’s empathic power because they remind us of the typical position we hold in relation to the physically disabled: looking on from the outside and, often, with an unwarranted sense of superiority. When juxtaposed with these third-person viewpoints, the vivacity of Bauby’s inner life all the more powerfully subverts many of society’s stigmas toward disabled individuals. At the same time, shots of Bauby in his paralyzed state serve to confront us with the reality of his condition. Swept up in the liveliness of his narration, we can all too easily forget just how punishing it is to be imprisoned in one’s own body. These shots ensure that this doesn’t happen.

The second way in which the film leaves its POV mode is through leaving the material world altogether. In the key turning point, Bauby chooses not to despair over his condition but rather takes advantage of what he still has: his imagination and memory. Previously, Schnabel had used imagined scenes to conjure up Bauby’s sense of entrapment — specifically, those of a man encased in a submerged diving suit à la The Graduate — but it is in the scenes conveying the newfound freedom of the mind that the film soars. Bauby’s shift in perspective is a monumental triumph of the human spirit, and Diving Bell celebrates this by plunging full-tilt into his headspace, showing his reveries of snowcapped mountains, opulent feasts, and romantic trysts on sun-soaked shores. These scenes are visually resplendent — Schnabel plays with frame rate and color filters to create rollicking montages that look like a National Geographic music video as assembled by Danny Boyle — but they’re also tactile and gustatorial, such as in a prolonged shot that catches every strand of hair blowing into the camera or in close-ups of mouths biting juicily and noisily into succulent delicacies. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, the sensorial vividness of these scenes is deeply moving because it shows that, though Bauby has physically lost much of himself, his mind enables him to feel whole again.

During one of the imagination sequences, Bauby’s voiceover suddenly shifts into a chastisement of the film itself, which is “erroneously” showing images of a young Marlon Brando when Bauby himself is the subject under discussion. This playful little “correction” gets at the core of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because it shows that Bauby has control over the film we’re watching — not literally, given that the real Bauby passed away a decade before the film’s release, but still veritably in the sense that the man’s voice and vantage point permeate every frame of the film to a degree seldom seen among biopics. “Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts,” the late Roger Ebert remarked when accepting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while.” This statement has never been truer of any film than it is of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is the kind of movie that can restore one’s faith in humanity.

Follow our complete retrospective on the best films of 2007.

No more articles