Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007)

I have no experience with disability, but I have heard that when a person, through birth or by an accident, loses function of one or more of their senses, the others become twice as strong. The body’s nervous system and its natural ability to redistribute the lost power of the terminated faculty to the others is not a minor miracle. I often think of the human body as low and crude, considering the animal mechanisms of pissing, shitting, and copulation, while forgetting the corporeal computer that regulates and commands the more nuanced functions, like the ability to distinguish textures through the fingers. True accounts have displayed the body’s sometimes extraordinary urge to remain alive, despite compounded inflictions. In some cases, the person who resides in the body is regretful of its stubbornness, compelling those who have no conception of such rotten and eternal incapacitation to dispute righteously about the ethical consequences of such an attitude.

But Julian Schnabel’s film, refreshingly, does not have issues of euthanasia or the like on its mind; it is a film that celebrates life and finds heartbreaking joy even in the tiniest remainders. It is far from sentimental, but Jean-Dominique Bauby is gifted with one of the more fortunate assembly of caregivers, and another film about a less successful extreme stroke victim could find just as many convincing reasons to despair as this one does to reassure.

Firstly, Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), when ambulatory, was the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, a chic and cosmopolitan playboy and mogul. We see brief flashbacks which sweep with him through photography studios populated by cool bohemians in his employ and see how intoxicating a pleasure life must have been for him. So it seems especially cruel that he should be stricken with a sudden and devastating stroke, leaving him paralyzed from head to toe, face contorted into a twisted bundle, utterly unable to express himself save his eyes, one of which must be sewn shut. Amalric’s one eye is more expressive than most actors’ entire faces. What at first seems like a somewhat endearing look of dumb animal helplessness is in fact a bursting inner life: his eye questions, it pleads, it is sometimes delighted at the compassionate solicitude it receives. Amalric is astonishing.

Schnabel insists on shooting the first quarter of the film strictly from Bauby’s point-of-view, a conceit that might cause some to scoff or roll their eye(s), but which worked for me in presenting the heightened consciousness that results from the redistributed powers of the faculties Bauby has lost now allowing his eyes and ears to absorb stimuli twice as richly. Do yourself a favor and watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in a quiet room, alone, to fully absorb the sights and the ambience which Schnabel has subliminally amplified. If you allow it, this film will envelop you enough that, when Bauby’s hushed voice-over enters, you’ll be startled to remember that it is not you being looked at and fussed over.



Again, despite my admiration I was nagged by the thought that the fussing would not be graciously spent on a poor black man in the same sort of paralyzed state or even a man the same age and appearance as Bauby, but without his celebrity. He (and we) are often blessed with a revolving door of gorgeous women, who he (and we) are welcome to gaze at close-up, pore-invading, eye-swimming glorious close-ups of actresses like Anne Consigny, Olatz López Garmendia, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Marie-Josée Croze. Garmendia plays Bauby’s physiotherapist, Croze, his speech therapist, Seigner, his concerned ex-wife and the mother of his children, and Consigny is the assistant sent by Bauby’s publisher to take dictation for his book. If you have not seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you’re probably curious as to how someone in Bauby’s condition could have possibly dictated a book...


Using a long, tedious process, his speech therapist, Henriette (Croze) lists off the alphabet in front of him in the order that the letters would most frequently be used (E is the most popular, followed by S, then A, then R, and so on). He blinks when she lands on the letter he is looking for. At first, the process is used merely to communicate with him, but by the end of the film, he has expressed a desire to write a memoir detailing the swirling, trapped inner life of a man with “locked-in syndrome.”

The primary shortcoming of the film is that it is adapted from Bauby’s memoirs of the same title. While the book’s completion represent a Herculean effort, it is a book which would probably not have received such attention had it been produced under normal circumstances. Bauby often narrates his thoughts and often his thoughts are groaning clichés: the diving bell is a heavy suit worn underwater symbolizing his isolation and confinement and the butterfly is his imagination taking flight away and above his caged body. These symbols could be interpreted by a child, conceived by a child, as symbols for isolation and imagination, and it may sound overly harsh to say that the warm acclaim that met his book had little to do with the actual content.

That is not to say that he is not interesting or funny or complex. He is all those things and more, and we come to empathize deeply with Bauby, despite cross admissions of bitterness and self-pity, sometimes stated outright by him via narration, sometimes revealed to us at the same time as he blinks it to Henriette, as when he tells her, but not us beforehand, that he wants to die. Thanks to Henriette (the warm and lovely Marie-Josée Croze, who resembles Naomi Watts) Bauby’s existence remains tolerable, and sometimes even satisfying, as he learns to take comfort in things that he would not have thought twice about while on the go. He is forced to cultivate patience, infinite patience, in his awful condition.

Besides Croze and Amalric, there are stand-out performances from Consigny, Niels Arestrup, and Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankolé. Most rewarding, though, are the two scenes with the magisterial Max von Sydow as Jean-Dominique’s father, Papinou. As of April 10, 2009, Von Sydow will be 80 years old. I pray that we get 80 more.


Grade: A-