Open your eyes: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I haven’t seen a film like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly before. For one, a huge part of the film unravels through the eyes of the protagonist, Jean-Dominique Bauby – and by ‘through the eyes’, I literally mean that the audience’s point of view is Bauby’s left eye – that is where the camera is. 

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the Chief Editor of Elle magazine - a man in the prime of his life, a lover of women and a family man at the same time. His career was supremely successful and glamorous – he was surrounded by models, photographers and bright lights all the time. At age 43, he suffered a disastrous stroke which left him completely paralyzed, except for his left eyelid. However, his brain was in perfect working order - a very rare condition called ‘locked-up syndrome’. The film’s title (and the book on which it is based), is thus a take on the human diving bell – a bell-shaped structure in which divers are supplied oxygen when they are underwater, and the intermittent swatches of memory that Bauby has of his previous life (the butterfly).

Right before his stroke, Bauby signed a contract with a publishing house to write a ‘feminine’ version of the Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo. The stroke makes him realize that that would perhaps be too ambitious a goal. With the help of the doctors and nurses at the Berck Hospital, where he lived for one year and two months, he uses his left eye to communicate to an assistant through blinks, and thus completes a book on his life. In the process, he learns lessons that he wished he knew when he was healthy - lessons about life and love, beauty and joy.

This film belongs to two people: one is Mathieu Amalric, who enacts Bauby. Whether it is the invalid patient of the film’s present or the sexy journalist of the past, the personality of Jean-Do, as he is called, shines through brilliantly. The other is, of course, director Julian Schnabel. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a work of art. It is a book, poetry and a film all in one. In the film’s official website, Schnabel says that he intended the film to be a ‘tool, like (Bauby’s) book, a self-help device that can help you handle your own death’. That may sound depressing, but the film isn’t, despite its story. 

Published in iProng Magazine, September 9, 2008