Julian Schnabel’s painterly directing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly deals with crux human life at it’s most delicate and demanding; artfully concealed and then simply, if not brutally, revealed. In this biopic of the late journalist, editor of French ELLE Jean-Dominique Bauby, or Jean-Do, we are placed into his hospital bed and behind the singular lens of his left eye – the only part of his being, aside from his mind, that he can control. After a massive stroke, he awakens from a coma to Locked-in Syndrome: a condition of full mental awareness and full body paralysis.

Among his first visitors is a former colleague who advises him: “Hold fast to the human inside of you.” The sense of tragedy and desperate hope that comes with this scene foreshadows much of the first half of the film. Yet slowly, with the help of his speech therapist and physical therapist, and the love of friends and family, he begins to overcome resistant reticence and accepts his ill-dealt fate; triumphantly. With the blink of an eye, Jean-Do quietly dictates his experience into a memoir, letter by letter.

What The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does so wonderfully, what makes it so moving, is the expression of pure moment we come to share with Jean-Do: the errant joke and its silent appreciation; the cruel irony, at once laughable and lamentable; the tender expression of friendship, of love; the realization that he and his father are both on the edge of some sort of death and forever estranged from one another. Jean-Do in his diving bell, his father in his old age. There is regret of a life played back as memories of “a string of near-misses, women I did not love, moments of happiness I let drift away.” And a buoyant turning point where, at the crossroads of prison and portal, he chooses to live vicariously through the limitless world of imagination and fantasy. By these universally understood and wholly valued moments, locked-in transforms to lived-out.

The film’s evolution-like that of a butterfly from a cocoon- is paced to reveal itself slowly and gracefully through a series of lyrical (both sonically and visually) scenes and those poignant themes, or moments. With his shots, camera angles, framing, and plays on depth and distance, Schnabel deftly avoids an overtly sentimental tone, instead making the most of visual metaphor. The location’s geographic assets help enormously with this task. Filmed in the north-western city of Berck, France, the chilling, windy, ocean-front climate serves the overarching feelings of transience, isolation, ethereality. And occasional bliss as only the tides of the sea can.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a wonderful reminder of the necessity of the other while living in solitary confinement with our Self. On my own I am not “you”, I am “me”. Yet when externalized, the I (eye) becomes “you” for everyone else to see. Jean-Dominique’s escape from “me” was the thinking, blinking creation of “you”, where his coping with entrapment could access an outlet as art for all to live.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u4vWkgxGnk[/youtube]

Julian Schnabel talks about making The Diving Bell and the Butterfly