The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Directed by Julian Schnabel
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a real person’s life story so inventively you might forget how rotten recent biopics have been. As part of director Julian Schnabel’s Cool Lives of Artists series (following films on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Reinaldo Arenas), this is not about an artist in the traditional sense; it depicts how Jean-Dominque Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine, managed to write his autobiography after suffering a stroke in the 1990s that paralyzed every muscle except his left eye. Schnabel understands what the imaginative life of an ambitious businessman and fashion capitalist like Bauby has in common with modern artistic types. Though set in haute-bourgeois territory, drawing from the Parisian highlife Bauby enjoyed, this turns out to be more radically perceptive than Control, the ostensibly hip British film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.
Ironically, it is Bauby’s story that has the improvisatory essence of punk while the Curtis’ biopic—set in miserable, working-class climate of post-punk England—actually offers little more than a glossy, superficial fashion magazine layout. Directed by rock photographer Anton Corbijn, the NME, music-video style of Control fails to penetrate Curtis’ character (based on a memoir by Curtis’ apparently clueless widow), while The Diving Bell intensifies the poignancy of a privileged life brought low. Envisioning Bauby’s world in fresh ways, Schnabel’s movie teaches about life. Control frustratingly illustrates the Joy Division phenomenon in literal-minded ways. (Curtis, played by Sam Riley, alienates himself from everyone, then records “Isolation” in the studio while even his bandmates ignore him.) This insults one’s sense of art and human relations and panders to post-punk’s doom-and-gloom stereotypes. But Schnabel separates Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) from his media-elite life to give an impressionistic representation of both his infirmity and keen sensitivity. He honors Bauby’s sense of being an “emotional Cyclops” through wide-eyed images of sexuality, language, parenting, family and friendship.
Echoing Germaine Dulac’s 1928 The Seashell and the Clergyman, Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a French Surrealist essence. Schnabel animates the mind of a man “locked in his own body”—his sinking/flying feeling. Given this difficult circumstance, the film is more divertissement than plot; it ruminates on perception (POV shots from the patient’s hospital bed), feeling (memory sequences of family life) and atmosphere (from medical staff protocol to landscape details). Each sequence suggests pure intuition. Schnabel sees what the Cyclops feels, adding his familiar surfing motif from the Basquiat and Arenas films—an image immediately conveying personal freedom and risk. Bauby says, “Other than my eye, two things are not paralyzed—my imagination and my memory. I can imagine anything I want.” This leads to a Marlon Brando photo-montage ingeniously representing male erotic and artistic liberty.
Schnabel thinks about images, not story (while Corbijn locks Ian Curtis in the B&W clichés of pop music photojournalism without ever understanding his neuroses). Schnabel’s images are the story: Isaach de Bankolé’s friendly intimacy in propping his feet on Bauby’s hospital bed while reading to him; Bauby stiffly propped up in a wheelchair yet wearing an elegant ascot under his breathing tube. Schnabel eases into observations that are naturally symbolic or wrings poetry from common situations: While shaving his aged, infirm father (Max von Sydow), the old man’s mirror reflection is seen next to his son’s youthful photo. These extremes are beautiful; only in the chronological account of Bauby’s troubled marriage and eventual mishap does Schnabel’s filmmaking turn conventional.
Painter, musician and general cultural dilettante, Schnabel shows genuine moviemaker instincts. Strangely, Corbijn and other pseudo-biographers—such as Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant—don’t. Control, I’m Not There and Last Days never achieve Schnabel’s artistic empathy. They’re anti-biographies of Dylan, Curtis and Kurt Cobain; competing with the life and art of their subjects through the directors’ own parasitical opportunism. Critic John Demetry noted that Haynes and Van Sant both avoid using their subjects’ actual names. It disguises their deadly intentions. This sycophancy has inspired the year’s funniest movie blurb so far from a reviewer who praised Control as “Not just a biopic but a great film about a musician’s life.”
It should be exciting if Schnabel ever adds a pop music subject to his Cool Lives of Artists tales. The rhythm of his impressionist film style seems perfectly suited; in fact, Corbijn’s only good scene in Control works like a Schnabel: When skinny, lonely, teenage Ian Curtis lies in bed smoking, listening to David Bowie’s “Jean Genie” or Roxy Music’s “2HB” and internalizes the alienation of glam rock, the sense of simultaneous ambition and desolation is similar to Schnabel’s uncanny expression of Bauby’s dilemma. These moments are trenchant and universal, not dependent upon the significance of rich or famous lives. Although hipsters may flock to Control for an ersatz taste of post-punk nostalgia (accepting Corbijn’s compendium of clichés simply because they’re dressed in B&W), it takes Schnabel’s unconventional imagination to restore intelligence to the biopic. He confirms Germaine Dulac’s bold dictum: “To understand this film, it is enough to look deeply into one’s self.” That’s a sufficient definition of what a good biopic makes possible.
Directed by Julian Schnabel
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a real person’s life story so inventively you might forget how rotten recent biopics have been. As part of director Julian Schnabel’s Cool Lives of Artists series (following films on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Reinaldo Arenas), this is not about an artist in the traditional sense; it depicts how Jean-Dominque Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine, managed to write his autobiography after suffering a stroke in the 1990s that paralyzed every muscle except his left eye. Schnabel understands what the imaginative life of an ambitious businessman and fashion capitalist like Bauby has in common with modern artistic types. Though set in haute-bourgeois territory, drawing from the Parisian highlife Bauby enjoyed, this turns out to be more radically perceptive than Control, the ostensibly hip British film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.
Ironically, it is Bauby’s story that has the improvisatory essence of punk while the Curtis’ biopic—set in miserable, working-class climate of post-punk England—actually offers little more than a glossy, superficial fashion magazine layout. Directed by rock photographer Anton Corbijn, the NME, music-video style of Control fails to penetrate Curtis’ character (based on a memoir by Curtis’ apparently clueless widow), while The Diving Bell intensifies the poignancy of a privileged life brought low. Envisioning Bauby’s world in fresh ways, Schnabel’s movie teaches about life. Control frustratingly illustrates the Joy Division phenomenon in literal-minded ways. (Curtis, played by Sam Riley, alienates himself from everyone, then records “Isolation” in the studio while even his bandmates ignore him.) This insults one’s sense of art and human relations and panders to post-punk’s doom-and-gloom stereotypes. But Schnabel separates Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) from his media-elite life to give an impressionistic representation of both his infirmity and keen sensitivity. He honors Bauby’s sense of being an “emotional Cyclops” through wide-eyed images of sexuality, language, parenting, family and friendship.
Echoing Germaine Dulac’s 1928 The Seashell and the Clergyman, Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a French Surrealist essence. Schnabel animates the mind of a man “locked in his own body”—his sinking/flying feeling. Given this difficult circumstance, the film is more divertissement than plot; it ruminates on perception (POV shots from the patient’s hospital bed), feeling (memory sequences of family life) and atmosphere (from medical staff protocol to landscape details). Each sequence suggests pure intuition. Schnabel sees what the Cyclops feels, adding his familiar surfing motif from the Basquiat and Arenas films—an image immediately conveying personal freedom and risk. Bauby says, “Other than my eye, two things are not paralyzed—my imagination and my memory. I can imagine anything I want.” This leads to a Marlon Brando photo-montage ingeniously representing male erotic and artistic liberty.
Schnabel thinks about images, not story (while Corbijn locks Ian Curtis in the B&W clichés of pop music photojournalism without ever understanding his neuroses). Schnabel’s images are the story: Isaach de Bankolé’s friendly intimacy in propping his feet on Bauby’s hospital bed while reading to him; Bauby stiffly propped up in a wheelchair yet wearing an elegant ascot under his breathing tube. Schnabel eases into observations that are naturally symbolic or wrings poetry from common situations: While shaving his aged, infirm father (Max von Sydow), the old man’s mirror reflection is seen next to his son’s youthful photo. These extremes are beautiful; only in the chronological account of Bauby’s troubled marriage and eventual mishap does Schnabel’s filmmaking turn conventional.
Painter, musician and general cultural dilettante, Schnabel shows genuine moviemaker instincts. Strangely, Corbijn and other pseudo-biographers—such as Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant—don’t. Control, I’m Not There and Last Days never achieve Schnabel’s artistic empathy. They’re anti-biographies of Dylan, Curtis and Kurt Cobain; competing with the life and art of their subjects through the directors’ own parasitical opportunism. Critic John Demetry noted that Haynes and Van Sant both avoid using their subjects’ actual names. It disguises their deadly intentions. This sycophancy has inspired the year’s funniest movie blurb so far from a reviewer who praised Control as “Not just a biopic but a great film about a musician’s life.”
It should be exciting if Schnabel ever adds a pop music subject to his Cool Lives of Artists tales. The rhythm of his impressionist film style seems perfectly suited; in fact, Corbijn’s only good scene in Control works like a Schnabel: When skinny, lonely, teenage Ian Curtis lies in bed smoking, listening to David Bowie’s “Jean Genie” or Roxy Music’s “2HB” and internalizes the alienation of glam rock, the sense of simultaneous ambition and desolation is similar to Schnabel’s uncanny expression of Bauby’s dilemma. These moments are trenchant and universal, not dependent upon the significance of rich or famous lives. Although hipsters may flock to Control for an ersatz taste of post-punk nostalgia (accepting Corbijn’s compendium of clichés simply because they’re dressed in B&W), it takes Schnabel’s unconventional imagination to restore intelligence to the biopic. He confirms Germaine Dulac’s bold dictum: “To understand this film, it is enough to look deeply into one’s self.” That’s a sufficient definition of what a good biopic makes possible.
