‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ REVIEW: A portrait of suffering and success
‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ REVIEW: A portrait of suffering and success
Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
Sleep paralysis is a frightening situation everyone has experienced at least once in their life. The feeling of being conscious yet immobile at the same time is nothing short of fear-inducing, but at least it doesn’t last long–it may persist for a minute or two, but the duration won’t reach beyond an hour. The lack of body control is absolutely terrifying to come across with, let alone imagine, but some people have actually experienced this for days, weeks, months, even years. One such person is Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French editor at Elle who, at 43, suffered a stroke that resulted in a pseudocoma state known as locked-in syndrome–a condition where a person cannot move nearly all of their voluntary muscle. Despite all that, he managed to compose and edit a memoir titled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by himself and communicated it using a partner-assisted scanning system. Despite all odds stacked against him, he still managed to finish the book and it was published a year later, but he sadly didn’t live long enough to see the inspiration his memoir gave to lots of people.
A decade later, filmmaker Julian Schnabel released a feature-length film of the same title, portraying Bauby’s life, aspirations, and hallucinations before and after the infamous incident happened. It started in Bauby’s own perspective, as he wakes up from his coma and realizes he cannot move every single muscle from his body but his eyes. His thoughts can be heard by the audience but not by the people around him, which is a good thing because he’s mostly irritated with every hospital staff and guest who visits him in his current state. Since he cannot communicate with his mouth nor move most of his body, his speech therapist developed a communication system, wherein he blinks his eye corresponding to the letter his speech therapist is saying amongst the list of letters–an excruciatingly arduous process.
A scene from the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
With this newfound way of communicating, Bauby, together with his speech and language therapist, decides to write a book, explaining what it feels like in his position, relating it to that of a person inside of a diving bell, while his soul roams freely like a butterfly. The film shifted perspective from that of Bauby to a third-person as the second-half progressed, showing the process of him writing the book, the inspiration in making that book, and his life before the incident, by mixing his own memories, dreams, and reality in the latter half of the runtime. In the end, his book was published and he died ten days after, as opposed to dying 2 days after in real life.
The film expressed a mixed bag of suffering and success, in a sense that it depicted a triumphant feat despite being in a debilitating condition. It’s feel-good and inspirational, yes, but it’s also a significant biopic that tells the actual struggles one might face when struck with locked-in syndrome. Mathieu Amalric portrayed Jean-Do spectacularly, tugging the heartstrings of every viewer, especially during the ending. The camerawork felt authentic enough that the audience feel like they’re with Bauby all throughout the film. One questionable idea that the film presented is the 8-day difference in the number of days between Jean-Do’s death and the publication–2 days in real life and 10 days in the film. Another aspect that separate the film version from what actually happened is the role reversal of his girlfriend and the mother of his children in the film–where it’s actually the girlfriend who stayed with Bauby after his stroke, as opposed to the mother of his children shown in the film; in short, it’s not really a perfect true-to-life biographical film. All in all, director Julian Schnabel fleshed out an emotionally cathartic biopic drama that inspires its viewers to always live life to the fullest.
