Movie Review: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (update: May 16, 2008)
Marie-Josée Croze as Henriette Durand
My earliest memory of Julian Schnabel are of mural-sized paintings, and photographs of the artist, topless, standing on windswept beaches. When his other films Basquiat and When Night Falls came out, I was hoping to see how he would translate it on to the screen. Everything I expected from those previous films is present in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where a pedestrian filmgoer like myself, can clearly detect the wonderful vista in the mind of an artist’s eye. The electronically-tinted tidewater glaciers breaking off in slow motion, majestically to Bach’s Concerto for Piano BWV 1056 Adagio is an absolute delight. Long hair blowing in an open-top convertible, the setting sun on the surface of a woman’s face. These are things that keep one’s interior warm and alive.
And speaking of the eyes, Mathieu Amalric has the most difficult job in the world: acting an entire movie with one eyeball. He succeeds with one dilated eye, anxiously bursting to free itself from the paralyzed body in which it belongs. Although Emmanuelle Seigner is featured on the cover, the real treat is Marie-Josée Croze as the therapist. Croze is one of those actors who, like Amanda Plummer, has such a total command of her face, she can make one dimple twist a certain way while an eyebrow moves another way, combining a facial expression that is constantly shifting, with complex emotions subtlely underlined. Anne Consigny as the stoic and handsome assistant gives that one working eye a good reason to open up each morning. If one were to pick actors for the many classical Bergman facial shots in this film, the ones presented here were excellent choices.
At first, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly reminded me of Johnny Got His Gun. After a while, like the incantation of the lettering system (“E,S,A,R,I,N….”) the story comes into its own, developing its unique visual vocabulary and rhythm. Like the most frequently-used letters, our protagonist draws on his most meaningful memories and imaginative fragments to help him construct a viable reason to exist and recuperate. It’s almost a play on the phrase “do I have to spell it out for you?” as we often see, from within the patient/narrator, that you can assemble letters into words, and then words into sentences, and yet, what is really going on inside your head, cannot always be translated.
