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.
Doctors peer at his face and try to coax words from him. They tell him he’s had a "cerebrovascular accident" -- once known as a massive stroke -- and is now paralyzed from head to toe. He suffers, they say, from "locked-in syndrome," in which a patient with a damaged brain stem retains all cognitive function but almost no motor skills. He can think but not move. He can hear but not talk.
He remembers his father and fantasizes sexy moments on a beach, all flights of his imaginative "butterfly" that journeys where he can’t. And he pictures himself trapped inside a "diving bell," depicted here as an old-style aqua suit bobbing in the ocean. The fear in Mathieu Amalric’s face (fantastically emotive as Bauby, even when frozen and slack) as he stares through that helmet matches the fear in his voice a few reels back, when his eye is stitched by a doctor. We see it from Bauby’s perspective: the needle, the lashes, the rim of his lid.
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.
"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.
A new kind of art movie, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it is deeply personal yet universal in its humanism. In French with English subtitles, it is rated PG-13 and has a running time of one hour, 52 minutes.
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Date and Time
Friday May 30, 2008 Tuesday Jun 3, 2008
May 30th, June 2nd, & 3rd at 7pm
Sunday, June 1st at 2pm
Location
Smith Opera House82 Seneca StGeneva, NY
Fees/Admission
$5 general admission$3 students & senior citizens
Website
Contact Information
315-781-LIVE
(5483) or toll-free 866-355-LIVE (5483)
