BlissAndConversation.com

Reviewing Your Life On Stage and Screen

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue  

Julian Schnabel, director

            Felled by a stroke at age 42, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of the French magazine ELLE, is left with “locked-in syndrome” in which his brilliant mind is as alert as ever but his sensuous body is completely paralyzed with one exception:  his left eye.  Like the Irish writer Christy, given an Oscar-winning portrayal by Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot”, Bauby takes what he has and weaves from it.

            In a heart-wrenching performance by Mathieu Amalric, we see him roaming his glamorous pre-stroke world like an erotic panther and, later, as a grotesque creature whose one bulging eye and drooping lip make him look like something from a horror movie.

            After being taught to spell by blinking his eyelid, Bauby composes his memoir, contrasting the images of a diving bell in which his physical body is encased and a butterfly which is his unconquerable imagination.

Adapted by Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) and shot by the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the film is melded by its director, the artist Julian Schnabel, into an experience that loses none of the horror and none of the pain while tracking all of the determination and ultimate glory and success of this remarkable man’s journey.

Beginning in his hospital room when he first wakes up, we see the blurred faces of the medical staff through his eyes as they tend him, the blunt devastating analysis of the senior doctor, the compassionate face of Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his children.  Although it’s she who visits him, Bauby yearns for his exotic mistress Ines (Agathe de La Fontaine), who says she adores him but can’t stand to see him the way he is now.  It’s equally difficult for Bauby’s aged father (Max Von Sydow) whom he has shaved tenderly.  Von Sydow conveys both the power and the anguish of a strong man wracked by his son’s disaster.  Now the caregiver is in the care of his therapists who teach him to blink and tend his needs. 

As Bauby determines to use his imagination to travel the world and create the life he loves, Schnabel and Kaminski take the camera from his body’s eye to his mind’s eye.  What he sees on the sand dunes and imagines in the sea is rivaled by his memories of Ines and the joy he takes in his children who, though saddened, are not appalled by his appearance.

As he completes “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, he tells the world his next book will be a female version of “The Count of Monte Cristo”.  Bauby’s memoir is published to rave reviews.  The novel may be alive in his head but, just ten days after the memoir is published, he dies.  His autobiographical work of power and imagination is interpreted by Schnabel, Harwood and Kaminski.

Make the movie work for you by remembering to take what happens and build on it.  Bauby’s work sets high standards. He makes life worth living by exercising imagination, cherishing memories and, above all, never relinquishing the sense of joy