THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)

Julian Schnabel directed this film. And it is the first time in a long time that I feel a director has really taken over and imprinted himself on the entire experience of a film.

The story is a true story. It is taken from a book by the same name written by the central character, Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby was the editor of the French Elle magazine, led a glamorous life, surrounded by fashion and glamour, a beautiful wife and two children, a mistress who loved him beyond reason and in the midst of his life, at 42 years of age, he had a stroke that left him entirely paralyzed except for his left eye. The film begins as he is coming out of a coma after everything has been done to save his life.

The film is shot almost entirely from his point of view, with blurred, out of focus images as seen through his one runny eye, an eye that he can't control. After twenty minutes or so it opens up and there are a few flashbacks and memory sequences, and scenes of pure imagination, but it always returns to the eye that sees but cannot move, can only be moved by nurses or therapists as they rearrange his helpless body in a bed or a chair.

In a remarkable way, that I may never be able to understand, Schnabel takes us totally inside the body, the mind and the heart, of this man who has lost everything except his one eye and his imagination, and we live with him as he discovers his deep and abiding need to communicate.

Bauby, or Jean-Do, as he is affectionately called by those friends and family who visit him, learned, with the help of a speech therapist, to communicate by spelling out words. A therapist, and eventually friends, would slowly recite the alphabet and when they reached the letter that Jean-Do was thinking of he would blink once. That letter would be written down and the alphabet recited again until the next letter in the word he was thinking of was reached and again the eye would blink, that letter written down, and again, and again until the therapist would guess the word, say it and the eye would blink once to signify that it was the correct word.

Jean-Dominique Bauby died six weeks after his book, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," was published. He wrote an entire book, a memoir of his experiences, in this painstaking manner. We experience the whole process from inside the mind, viewed by the eye of this man. Perhaps once, maybe twice, there is a shot that is from a point of view other than Jean-Do's, and even that may well be his imagination at work, the way he imagines a scene to be taking place if he were able to move.

It sounds hideously difficult to watch, doesn't it? I am sure it was hideously difficult to live. But Schnabel offers us the opportunity to become extremely intimate with the phenomenal heroism of Bauby's effort, and with the strength, the faith, and the affection and love of the people who stayed with him throughout the ordeal. And by the time the film ends, you feel only that you have witnessed and act of tremendous beauty. And Schnabel, as well as Bauby, is responsible for that beauty.

It is filmmaking of a very different order than most films. It exists on a higher plane. At every level, from the intimacy of the story, to the astonishing beauty of the camera work and the editing, to the truth and the reality of the acting, this film may be without peer in my experience.

I don't know why the two films I chose to review this week are both about people bound to beds by disease or affliction of some terrible and terminal kind. I don't know why. I don't think I'll do it again for a while. But whereas one, "Wit," fails to do anything more than make be dread dying and it's end result, death, the other, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," is really beautifully uplifting in the way it celebrates life, and faith, and love, and courage, and the human spirit as it continually reaches out to communicate against all obstacles.