Review by Richard Toews

He set out to write a book on vengeance but instead discovered grace. Julian Schnabel’s latest gem The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, starring Mathieu Amairic as Jean-Dominque Bauby, is, if anything, a vibrant, visual monument to the overpowering mystery of the human imagination.

Schnabel’s film is a recreation of the last years of Bauby’s life after he suffered a stroke which reduced him to a state of absolute helplessness known as “locked-in syndrome.” His brain worked perfectly, yet his body was as if frozen in time save for the movement of his left eye. The once ebullient editor of Elle magazine, became what, for the American author Flannery O’Conner, was a model of grace - the grotesque figure.

The film opens with Bauby waking from a coma. Immediately, he fails to comprehend that while he hears his thoughts, they are only that; the health care practitioners in attendance regard Bauby as a minimally functioning object – he has no voice. But in the economy of O’Conner, the grotesque figure, while broken, threatens a world that prizes the principle of harmony over difference. The mere presence of Bauby challenges invisibility. He will be heard and in one defying gesture, Bauby discovers what it means to be human.

With the help of his nurse, who teaches him to communicate words through the blinking of his eye, he accomplishes the near impossible - he writes a book, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", and in the process he comes realize that imagination and memory supersede the constriction that has imprisoned his body. Indeed he can begin to live a vibrant life as never before.

In allowing us to share and thereby participate in Bauby’s memory, Schnabel enables us to feel what is perhaps the most poignant moment in the film, Bauby’s visit with his seemingly helpless father, and the subsequent call from a father to a son who is now the helpless. The link between father and son is powerfully relived when Bauby connects at the deepest level as a father with his children who come to visit him. That link as all the more profound when we learn that it is in his final visit before his stroke, Bauby shared a memory of his childhood with his only son.

The seriousness of the film is more than compensated by humour deftly delivered by a brilliant cast, Almaric in particular, but wonderfully supported by Emmanuelle Seigner who plays his estranged wife, and Max Von Sydow as is father.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Julian Schnabel | France/USA | 114 min

Fri. Oct. 5 | 9:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Sun. Oct. 7 | 4:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre