Nominated for four Academy Awards, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent cinema. 

Something miraculous occurred,'' says the voice of "French Elle" editor Jean-Dominique Bauby in a revelatory moment -- one of many -- in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." But the miracle isn't a cure or a heavenly vision. It's a grunt: a growly, phlegmy, nonverbal attempt at singing by a man who can't even speak.

He can't move his arms or legs, either. He can't see out of his right eye, which is sewn shut to stave off infection. The one reliable moving part on his entire person is his left eye, which he blinks in response to questions. One blink yes, two blinks no.

Family and friends and therapists hold up an alphabet, read it aloud, and stop at a letter when he blinks. In this manner he communicates. He spells out the pains of living. And he writes a book: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," published in 1997 and now dramatized by director-artist Julian Schnabel, who has transformed Bauby's slim, searing memoir into a film of poetic vision.

His arrival at that extraordinary conclusion is, in its impressionistic and light-touched manner, the thrust of the movie. 

Schnabel, ethereal cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (who won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for 'The Pianist") meld waking life with memory and imagination in collages of gossamer beauty off-set by the mundane. Jean-Do is bathed. A fly lands on his nose. The estranged mother of his children (Emmanuelle

Seigner) visits faithfully, but an adored new girlfriend won't come.

In an inspired choice, Schnabel had the script translated from English into French, with the collaboration of his actors, adding a frisson to a production that in some ways approaches documentary, employing the real-life sites of Bauby’s story -- including a hospital where he was treated. Some of the medical staffers who treated him are even cast in the film.

It's an abstraction that underscores the bond between the men, reinforced seconds later when Papinou tells Jean-Do how proud he is of him. "We all are children," Jean-Do recalls. "We all need approval."

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" inter-twines the need for validation -- which is tied to the impulse to create -- and the inevitability of isolation and death. Locked in, Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a luminous treatise on life and love, leaving behind a work of art that says "I was here and I mattered." Schnabel honors that impulse with this mature, resonant portrait of an artist.