The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

Julian Schnabel, France, 2007, 112 minutes

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly chronicles the effects a major stroke on a man who subsequently has a condition called locked in syndrome. It begins with him waking up from a 3 weeklong coma and discovering from a neurologist that the only part of his body he has control over is his left eye-lid. Along the way, as he swam in and out of consciousness, memories from his past swelled into the present, resulting in a cinematic experience that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Schnabel somehow manages to convey Bauby's internal life with remarkable clarity, employing first-person perspective, striking cinematography (by the always great Janusz Kaminski), and Amalric's pained, life-affirming monologues. The result is a wholly original experience, a painful and tender portrait of a life that is made all the more exhilarating because of its close proximity to death.

It was inspired by the memoir of a French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby who wrote the whole novel by blinking his eye to choose the letters and communicate with the transcriber. The book reportedly took 200,000 blinks to complete and each word took approximately two minutes. Through this painstaking method, beautifully adapted to film, we gather together an idea of the psychological torment of a man being locked inside his body as well as his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.

Review by Mirella Yandoli
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2008