Monday, January 14, 2008

Chad Betz reviews The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel and Spielberg's current go-to DP Janusz Kaminski here devise a visceral cinematographic schema to take us within the mind of an almost totally paralyzed man who can only see out of one eye, which he uses to blink out his thoughts to those who loom into his line of sight like spectres from a life past and lost. We are brought into his means of communicating because we see the closing and opening darkness, once for "yes" and twice for "no." A voice-over provides us with his thoughts, which only he and us can hear. It's ingenious and difficult to take because we sit there in the theater and we look straight ahead at the screen and we taste a hint of what Monsieur Bauby experienced, because cinema only touches the same two senses that Bauby's cerebrovascular accident left him, seeing and hearing. A commercialized, forcefully sentimental, unimaginative approach was the only thing that could've brought down a film this simple and coursing with inherent pathos; thankfully the film's methods are equal parts French New Wave and Felliniesque, the sentiment is pure and undecorated, and the imagination is wild. This is fractured vision and sound with flights of memory and fantasy bursting from the ragged cracks, and Schnabel's and Kaminski's rendering of that state becomes rapturously poetic.

Of course, few audiences would be able to take a whole film trapped within that perspective, and as the film goes along it more and more frequently goes to the third person (perhaps representative of Bauby's growing out of his crushed self-absorption and becoming more thoughtful of the people in his life). There's also a fairly pop soundtrack, perhaps intended to tap into a playlist of favorite songs like Bauby might have done in his mind when there was no one to play the music for him. And it's understandable, because nobly enough, the last intention of this film is to depress. Bauby's suffering is ugly, but the things he sees are terrifyingly beautiful, and though the film certainly doesn't treat him as any sort of saint, his soul becomes beautiful to us as it reflects to us the beauty he perceives (through the book that he writes in the film and on which the film is based), too intense for him to absorb it all himself -- like the moon reflecting the light of the sun. This is not so much a "triumph of the human spirit" film as it's a "triumph of beauty over the broken human spirit" film. It won't make you feel good, necessarily, but it will make you glad for the life you have within you and will affect you by recognizing that same spark in those trapped by crumpled shells, by diving bells.

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