Seeing the world through ...

Being a journalist and something of a drama queen, but lacking an artistic streak, I tend to focus more on screenplay and performance than direction when it comes to evaluating films. However, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly spoke to me first and foremost on a visual level. What a surprise.

“I look like I came out of a vat of formaldehyde.”

So “says” the vinegary French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) during director Julian Schnabel’s visually arresting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. While driving, the 41-year-old Bauby suffered a massive stroke and ended up a victim of “locked-in syndrome:” He’s almost completely paralyzed, but his brain operates normally. To communicate, he must learn to use his one functional body part: his left eyelid.

With uncomfortable depictions of Bauby’s paralysis, Schnabel, also an artist, mostly overcomes the inevitable sappy arc of such triumph-over-adversity storylines. (Ronald Harwood, of The Pianist, handled the adaptation of Bauby’s affecting memoir.) Diving Bell’s initial moments, shot by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, are from a patient’s point of view: eyes blinking, screen cloudy, body trapped. We’re in this same state during the particularly harrowing sequence when doctors sew Bauby’s right eye shut. Schnabel then pans out to the crude, black stitches.

Bauby feels as if “my whole body is encased in a diving suit,” a sensation Schnabel emphasizes with repeated images of being at the bottom of the sea, complete with muffled sound. It’s an especially jarring contrast to the many beautiful women surrounding Bauby, their long, loose hair sensual and free in the wind. Meanwhile, Bauby can only sit, immobile.

With Diving Bell, Schnabel has created a tribute to the senses and our consciousness. The following is a cliché, but an appropriate one: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will make you feel alive.