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Home » Culture and Criticism

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

Submitted by on February 1, 2008 – 5:14 PM3 Comments

Fantastic movie — the crowd at BAM Rose Cinema notwithstanding. Get there on time, people, and if for some reason you can’t manage that, please carry on any conversations about where to sit in a whisper if the film has already begun. Lovely, real performances; innovative solutions to point-of-view problems, especially impressive because of how tricksy that could have gotten, but didn’t; strong pacing and use of flashbacks. When you compare Diving Bell with Punch-Drunk Love, which is the movie I’d seen just previously, it’s a lesson in everything P.T. Anderson tries to do, but doesn’t quite succeed with usually, because he’s too focused on his story as construction, the bells and whistles he can attach. This isn’t an “incorrect” approach, but it’s not why I watch movies.

Schnabel’s work is all the more impressive because of the subject matter. An ill or disabled protagonist is a challenge to nuance, and while the illness or disability in question is often what drives the story, there’s always the danger of letting it become a character that takes over — a collection of tics, a series of expositional scenes about symptoms. That doesn’t happen here, and Bauby isn’t a sainted Hallmark object of pity; he’s real, not because he’s a real person (although that’s also the case) but because you just can’t imagine what it would be like to be him…until the film lets you imagine it. And he can move one eye, that’s it. And Schnabel barely speaks French, the language the movie is shot in. But at the end of two hours, this man who can’t communicate except by winking has become a friend.

A pair of short scenes — Bauby’s friend reading to him, followed by a shot of the two of them that night, Bauby in his bed, the friend asleep in the chair next to the bed with the book in his lap — brought tears to my eyes. Because I know these people. This is what a friendship is. This is how people speak to each other, even when they speak without speaking. Especially then, actually.

I don’t want to oversell it and make anyone feel like it’s one of those high-fiber Important Movies that’s more to be admired than enjoyed, because I had that same “let’s get it over with” attitude myself going into it. Let it win you over.

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3 Comments »

  • RJ says:

    Sounds like you had the same audience we had at “Juno.” I sometimes wonder if these people travel in packs and occasionally wander into the wrong theater. HATE.

  • Canonfodder says:

    I understand what you mean about that is what friendship is. A couple of years ago I was deathly ill. I was not particularly oriented to reality, (couldn’t remember what year it, who the fricking Prez was) and I woke up one morning in a darkened hospital room. The first thing I saw was one of my close friends just sitting quietly next to my bed. No book, no tv. I still tear up when I think of it, and how much comfort it brought me at the time.

  • May says:

    Something is especially powerful about the ordinariness of getting through just one more day. This movie really impressed me. (There were maybe 20 people in the theater at the 5:50 showing at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas last night.) We have Jean-Do’s perspective, and we get to experience his caretakers and loved ones’ points of view. I also appreciate the monotony and frustration I felt (which somehow transformed into great empathy for the main character), because that’s the way Jean-Do’s life seemed to unfold – no major breakthroughs, no big flourishes. (He moves his head half a degree. He blinks with greater efficiency. He grunts.) Just vulnerability, all the time, for one more day. Yet, that’s one more day to imagine otherwise.

    When he gets off the phone with his dad, who’s sobbing, and when we see through Jean-Do’s eye that it’s filled with tears and the room turns blurry, that really got me.

    Brilliant film.

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