Past Programs
Disabilities - 2008
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)
14/02/2008
Julian Schnabel, a painter who makes movies, has now made three, all about artists. The first was about the graffitist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the second, a much, much better film, starred Javier Bardem as the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas who defied Castro, escaped to new York and later died of AIDS.
Now we have The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a much bigger project because the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir was a huge bestseller. Ronald Harwood wrote the screenplay. Johnny Depp was supposed to star in it, but went off to play a pirate.
But with Schnabel at the helm it became a far better film than it may otherwise have been. He made the right casting choices. He filmed it in the right language -- French. Anything else would have been a compromise.
And he brought an artist's eye, creating a visual language to place us inside the experience of Jean-Dominique, known as Jean-Do. He was, at 43, a man flying high. The well-known editor of Elle magazine, he had position, status, power, and a beautiful woman on his arm.
The film opens in a blur. We are seeing through the eyes of a man immobilised in a hospital room. Gradually we can make out turquoise walls, a curtain flapping in the breeze. Faces loom out of the blur, leaning over him speaking down to him. A doctor tells him briskly he has had a severe stroke. And that one eye is so damaged it will have to be occluded, surgically closed. But the other eye...can he move it? Blink once for yes, twice for no. 'Good,' says the doctor, briskly. 'Then there are things we can do.'
For almost the first half of the film we do not see the paralysed Jean-Do directly. We see him as he was, in brief flashbacks, fragments of memory, moments of poetic fantasy. But in the present, in that hospital room we are with him and he is locked in, unable to communicate with those around, as he imagines a man imprisoned in a diving bell plunging to the depths, unable to make himself heard.
So we see only what he sees in his little hospital room, we hear what he hears, and we hear his frank, often exasperated, sometimes cruel comments as others faces come and go, as he is handled, toileted, washed, fed, manipulated. They've brought him back to life, he's told. 'This is life?' he comments.
With screenwriter Ronald Harwood, and the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Schnabel has the camera become Jean-Do's one, rolling eye, usually focused in close-up. Seldom has a single point of view been deployed more effectively in cinema. And we stay with Jean-Do's point of view for almost half the film, interspersed with his memories of his life before, and with his fantasies.
Into his life in that room come two helpers: a physiotherapist, and a speech therapist, Henriette, played by Marie-Josee Croze. It is she who will devise a way for Jean-Do to communicate, by chanting the French alphabet to him, in order of the most frequently used letters, while he blinks: one blink for yes, two for no. There is much drama in this situation, because Jean-Do is not a patient man. Only later does he realise that his imagination is still free.
It's extremely difficult to make drama around an immobilised man. Hitchcock did it in Rear Window, many since have failed. But by combining this rigorous point of view shots in the hospital with wild poetic metaphors as Jean-Do's imagination kicks in, the film becomes much more than a weepy saga of rehabilitation.
For a start, Jean-Do is not a very nice, empathetic man. He is (or was) a man of vigorous libido, and there is conflict between the women in his life: his devoted ex-wife, played by Emmanuelle Seigneur, whose visits irritate him and his lover, who lets him down...and the devotion of his therapists, particularly Henriette, a devotion mixed with religion and a barely repressed sexuality.
As Jean-Do himself, Mathieu Amalric is exceptional. This sexy ugly French actor, who looks incredibly like Roman Polanski in mid life, is magnetic in flashback, then emerges finally midway through the film as the imprisoned Jean-Do, head slipping sideways, one eye rolling behind giant magnifying glasses, like a drowned Cyclops. But by then we know the man so well we are not repelled. And we are ready for the final stages of this journey.
This is by no means a melancholy film, nor one about 'how I became a better person through suffering'. Probably he didn't. While it expands Jean-Do's memoir, it also cherishes every ironic line. Finally what it leaves one with is a profound respect for each human consciousness, and for language. The one creates the other.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells us this in a way which is pure cinema.
Blindsight
07/02/2008
A documentary which tells an extraordinary story: a team of six young Tibetans, all blind, scaling a peak on the north side of Mt Everest (Lhakpa Ri), all 23,000 feet of it. They're led by the blind American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, who himself scaled Everest in 2001.
And with them is German-born Sabriye Tenberken, another remarkable person. Blind herself, Sabriya set up the only blind school in Tibet, educating many children shunned or shut away by Tibetan families.
It's an absorbing and rewarding film, as we get to know the students and as they test their own abilities. There is tension and conflict during the climb, not least between the world view of Sabriya and the more competitive, goal driven Erik and his fellow mountaineers, tactfully but truthfully captured by British director Lucy Walker. Uneven, but a journey worth taking.
