The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Review: Freedom in a Blink

Is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly worth watching?

Yes. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the most inventive and moving films about illness ever made, a true story told almost entirely from inside the mind of a man who can move only one eye. Julian Schnabel turns a potentially unbearable subject into something vivid, sensual and often wryly funny, and Mathieu Amalric gives a remarkable performance largely through voice and a single eye. The only reservation is that the film’s fantasy and memory passages are less consistently powerful than its astonishing first act.

What is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly about?

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) was the editor of the French edition of Elle, a charming, successful man in his forties, until a massive stroke left him with locked-in syndrome: his mind fully intact, his body almost completely paralysed. He wakes in a hospital on the French coast able to communicate only by blinking his left eye. With the help of a speech therapist (Marie-Josée Croze), who develops a system of reciting the alphabet so he can blink at each letter, Bauby begins to dictate a memoir, letter by painstaking letter. Emmanuelle Seigner plays the mother of his children, one of the people who visit him as he learns to live inside this new reality.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was directed by Julian Schnabel and adapted by Ronald Harwood from Bauby’s own memoir. It is a French-language film running 112 minutes, and it won Schnabel the Best Director prize at Cannes.

A camera that becomes a body

The film’s opening stretch is one of the boldest sequences in modern cinema. For a long time, the audience sees only what Bauby sees: blurred faces leaning over the lens, a doctor’s hands, the world tilting and swimming out of focus. We hear his thoughts in voiceover, sardonic and frightened, while the people around him can hear nothing. Janusz Kamiński’s photography makes the viewer share his confinement, and the effect is claustrophobic and deeply affecting.

Crucially, the subjective camera is not a gimmick. It makes the moment when Bauby’s inner voice meets the outside world, through the slow alphabet system, feel like a triumph. The first words he manages to spell out carry enormous weight because the film has made us feel every second of his silence.

Mathieu Amalric’s voice and a single eye

Amalric has one of the strangest roles an actor could take on: much of his performance is heard, not seen. His voiceover carries Bauby’s humour, vanity, self-pity and fury, and it keeps the film from sentimentality. This is not a saintly patient but a funny, flawed, sometimes selfish man, and the film is richer for that honesty.

When the camera finally shows Bauby from the outside, Amalric’s stillness is devastating. In flashbacks, he plays the earlier Bauby as charismatic and careless, which makes the contrast all the more painful. Marie-Josée Croze and Emmanuelle Seigner give warm, subtle performances as the women whose patience makes his memoir possible, and a brief appearance by Max von Sydow as Bauby’s elderly father is among the film’s most touching scenes.

Imagination and memory as escape

The film’s title contrasts the heavy diving bell of Bauby’s body with the butterfly of his imagination, and Schnabel, a painter by background, gives that imagination free rein. Memories, fantasies and dreamlike images break into the hospital scenes, from glimpses of his former life to visions of travel and indulgence. Many of these passages are gorgeous, and they express the film’s belief that the mind can remain free even when the body cannot.

Not all of them are equally effective. Some of the fantasy images feel more decorative than revealing, and the middle stretch can lose a little of the urgency that made the opening so gripping.

Who should watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?

It is essential for lovers of serious drama and biography, and for viewers interested in formally inventive filmmaking. Its subject is illness and paralysis, which some viewers may find difficult, but the tone is far more alive and humorous than that description suggests. There is some sexual content and frank discussion of the body. At under two hours, it is a focused and rewarding watch.

Two French-language films that make natural companions:

• Amour, Michael Haneke’s unsparing study of illness and devotion within a marriage.
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire, another painterly film about looking, memory and what images can hold.

The verdict

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a luminous, humane film that turns a story of devastating illness into a celebration of imagination and communication. Its fantasy sequences are uneven, but Julian Schnabel’s visual daring and Mathieu Amalric’s remarkable performance make it an unforgettable experience.

Rating: 4.5/5