The adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's remarkable memoir, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," constitutes something like a collective cinematic tour de force. The original book, itself an heroic accomplishment, documents the plight of its author, who suffered a massive stroke, which initially sank him into a coma, then, when he awakened, froze him in a condition that his doctors, apparently lacking a French term, called "locked-in syndrome." To make a motion picture about a man totally paralyzed, able only to blink one eye, in effect required of virtually all the artists involved a daring violation of most of the rules and traditions of film.

At 42 years of age Bauby, the editor of Elle, the French fashion magazine, knew a life of success and fulfillment. Though separated from his family, he apparently maintained a good relationship with his three children and their mother, and enjoyed the blessings of a splendid career, including riches, fame, and the love of beautiful women. His calamity of course robbed him of all those gifts, and worse, took away the possibility of even the slightest physical sensation, leaving him only with his hearing and the sight in one eye.

Imprisoned within his helpless body, he felt himself enclosed in a diving bell, submerged in a bottomless sea, but as the movie shows, his mind and heart allowed him to fly away from that prison, free as a butterfly, traversing the blossoming fields of his imagination. Through memory, dream, and fantasy, he creates another world, where successions of images liberate him from his paralysis. He records those experiences through the excruciating process of blinking his one good eye for yes or no when a secretary reads a letter of the alphabet; out of that agony he and his amanuensis make the words and sentences becomes his book.

Despite the necessary voice-over narration of Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, the movie never sacrifices its obligation to the visual; the director, Julian Schnabel, never allows the possibility of a dull, static documentary to obscure the visual beauty of his (and Bauby's) images. He frees the camera from the confines of the hospital to show the patient from the point of view of his attendants and visitors, to dramatize his memories and fantasies, to make the book come alive. But he also takes the risk of putting his audience almost literally inside his protagonist's head, so that we awaken from the coma with him, see the world and its people through his eye, see a doctor sew the bad eye shut, and above all, experience the painful process of writing the book.

The director's audacity in undertaking the challenge of filming such a potentially deadly subject matches in some small degree the courage of the author, who died soon after publication of his book. His cast also deserves credit, not only for their competence as actors, but for their own violation of the conventions of filmmaking and film acting. Positioning the point of view mostly within Bauby's vision forces the actors to play constantly, closely, and directly to the camera, which usually suggests artificiality and destroys verisimilitude.

As Bauby, Amalric speaks in a generally sardonic tone, berating himself for his understandable moments of self pity, silently screaming with frustration over his inability to communicate, but because of his anger and impatience, making his poetic metaphors and lyrical descriptions all the more convincing and not in the least corny or maudlin. The other actors match his performance with a mixture of strong feeling and a sense of willed control. One of the most powerful and moving moments, out of many in the movie, occurs when Bauby's ex-wife must translate his blinks to the woman he left her for over the telephone, which captures the painful complexity of the picture's emotions.

Finally, despite the potential for excess in the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby's catastrophe and decline, the film never wallows in sentimentality, but maintains a spirit that matches the author's own courage. Because the screenwriter and director adhere to Bauby's words, their picture, paradoxically, achieves a visual triumph, a fitting memorial to an amazingly heroic man. 

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

(PG-13), directed by Julian Schnabel.

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