We enter The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as if waking from a dream. Half asleep, disorientated and struggling to focus, we open our eyes and find ourselves in a brightly lit hospital room. Except Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jean-Do to his friends) isn’t waking from an afternoon’s sleep; he is coming round from a three-week coma following a massive stroke. Though Jean-Do is completely 'normal' inside he has been left totally paralysed, only able to move his left eye.

At the time of his stroke Jean-Do, the Editor in Chief of Elle magazine, had a contract for a book. Remarkably he chose to fulfill it. By blinking in response to the alphabet, he dictated his account of life after his stroke. The film is the very clever adaptation of that extraordinary work.

In the film’s opening scenes we see everything from Jean-Do’s point of view. It’s an efficient way of introducing an audience to his plight and creates moments of both horror and humour. Thankfully, just as the technique is starting to become limiting, and a little irritating, our view expands - this is when the film really kicks into gear. We watch flashbacks as if observing someone else’s memories from the inside, and get to glimpse into Jean-Do’s imagination through inventively shot fantasy sequences and well chosen stock footage. Director Julian Schnabel has taken this moving story and turned it into a beautiful piece of cinema.

Mathieu Amalric does a fine job in the central role and the supporting cast are uniformly excellent; particularly, Emmanuelle Seigner as the mother of Jean-Do’s children and Max Von Sydow as his elderly father.

Unfortunately, some things are lost in translation. Bauby’s book and the French version of the film are titled Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. Jean-Do’s metaphor for his condition is not a diving bell but the familiar image of a vintage diving suit. It’s a minor, but annoying, change as the visual metaphor of the diving suit is used many times during the film, whereas there isn’t a diving bell in sight (don’t get me started on the lack of Pan in Pan’s Labyrinth). Equally irksome is the subtitling of the French alphabet. If Jean-Do is dictating ‘thank you’, as he blinks to signal the first letter, we hear ‘M’ and a ‘T’ appears on screen. This tails off before the film is over, which is a blessing as it somewhat distracts from the near poetic quality of the recitation of the alphabet in French.

Sheer pedantry on my part, but frustrating if only because these irritations could have been easily avoided when presenting a film as good as this.

 

 

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