Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel 2007)

(This is part of the 10th Cinemanila International Film Festival which is ongoing until Oct. 29 at the Gateway Cineplex 10, Gateway Mall, Araneta Center, QC.)

If you could see all through my eye

Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is based on a book by Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jean-Do, as friends call him) who suffered a stroke, fell into a coma for twenty days, and woke up with a rare condition, "locked-in syndrome." He could think, smell, hear (faintly), see, but couldn't move a single muscle in his entire body with one exception--his left eye.

Schnabel tackles head-on the challenge which one filmmaker or another has dreamed of, telling a story almost exclusively through a single point of view (Orson Welles planned to film Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" this way; Robert Montgomery actually succeeded with Lady in the Lake (1947), even if the results aren't always compelling). Schnabel succeeds, perhaps not completely, but more than any previous filmmaker I can think of, with the first forty minutes almost exclusively told through Bauby's left eye (exceptions include a brief flashback, and a harrowing sequence where Bauby's immobile right eye is being 'occluded').

Welles' and Montgomery's problem, of course, was in attempting to create the illusion of the protagonist's point of view as an uninterrupted shot (with all its accompanying technical and dramatic difficulties). We know of course that this isn't so--our view is constantly interrupted by eyeblinks and sudden shifts in attention (the eye moving too fast for images to register clearly); it's obscured by eyelashes, momentary blurring, even tears. Schnabel (with the help of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) painstakingly recreates each of these effects with cinematic analogues, using jump cuts (for blinks), flickering shadows (for lashes), out-of-focus lensing and smeared imagery for blurring and tears. Then there are subtler effects, like cutting off the heads and shoulders of people talking to Bauby, to underscore the fact that his view of the world comes entirely from one eye, and that the eye is unable to move.

But Bauby's eye is only half his capability to apprehend and comprehend the world; the other half is his inner eye, which surveys the double realm of memory and imagination. Schnabel conceives of memory as looking like old film footage, with handheld camerawork and the slightly washed-out colors of old Super 8; imagination is granted an altogether different look, with gliding camera moves (suggesting a freedom he doesn't have), opulent colors (suggesting a voluptuousness he can't feel), crystal clarity, and the occasional, defiantly surreal image (a wheelchaired Bauby on a wooden platform standing in the middle of an ocean; the wind whipping a woman's hair into a frenzy of seething serpents; Empress Eugenie running and Nijinsky leaping through the corridors of the hundreds of years old hospital). Perhaps the single most inspiring shot is that of a gigantic iceberg stretching from one side of the screen to the other in all its detailed majesty, collapsing slowly into the ocean; by film's end the process is reversed, and the shards of ice leap up from the boiling seawater to re-form, jigsaw-puzzlelike, back into the glacier--a more bravura image of reversal, renewal, redemption, of defiance in the face of entropy, would be difficult to find in recent cinema.

Audio at the very least makes up half of Schnabel's arsenal. When people talk to Bauby, we hear them through the film's standard stereo track, complete with ambient outdoor or indoor sounds; when we hear Bauby talking to himself it's as if he speaks in a locked room, a small one at that--we can sense the room's size (or lack of) through the voice's reverberations (or lack of).

The soundtrack, which includes Bach and pop standards like Charles Trenet's "La Mer" and Tom Waits' "All the World is Green," betray Schnabel's film-literate orientation (I wouldn't know about the real-life Bauby). He includes excerpts from the lush piano score of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962) and from the score of Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959)--in particular the piercingly beautiful passage when Doinel rides the police van through the night streets of Paris, and the city never looked more magical or unreachable (no accident, I suspect, that the excerpt was taken from Doinel's last night before incarceration). At one point he calls his favorite spot in the hospital--an open terrace looking out on a small suburban town--his Cinecitta, after the famed Roman studio, and indeed there's something of the stage, or dais, or podium about his vantage point, something of the artificially miniaturized studio set about the town in view.

The effect of Bauby speaking out to correct or contradict or protest the images fed to him by his eye can at times be humorous (as when a hospital staff turns off the soccer game he's watching) or heartrending (as when he begs them to leave his right eye alone). It's the helplessness, you imagine, of Montresor rattling his bells inside his walled-in tomb, in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," or of Emily Webb mourning the wasted ruin of her life in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. it's the helplessness and isolation we all feel at one time or another, that we somehow can't fully engage the outside world in the manner we'd prefer, that the universe is a complex and hostile and unknowable place, that we somehow can't connect with one another, no matter how hard we try. Of course, Bauby could only appreciate what he has--or had--just when he's lost them; he seems to connect best with other people, especially the mother of his children Celine (Emmanuelle Signer) only when that connection is at its most physically challenging. It's not the medium that matters, Schnabel seems to tell us, but the content, and the passion with which one wants to communicate said content.

Or is it as simple as all that? Perhaps Schnabel means to say that medium does matter, that it's the daunting nature of the challenge that forces Bauby to reach out and 'touch' someone. One only has to sit down and see the film, appreciate how natural Schnabel's effects can be, how effortlessly he lets us slip--that's the proper word, I think--into Bauby's shoes (suit, if you like), show us what Bauby's thinking, what he's up against, and what, most of all, is at stake. If the film has any power, if it maintains such a masterful grip on our emotions and imagination, that may be because Bauby's situation is really ours (considerably exaggerated), and his story, realized through Schnabel's tremendous filmmaking capabilities, is our own--we hear him speak for us in his locked-away voice, watch him look for us with fear and wonder at a strange, at times hostile world using his restlessly roving eye.

Interesting--ironic, even--that on its journey from page to screen the film's very story underwent mediation, distortion, transformation. According to an article in online magazine Salon, the women in Bauby's life served radically different roles--the mother of Bauby's children (real name Sylvie de la Rochefoucauld) visited at most a few times, while Bauby's gilrfriend (real name Florence), depicted onscreen as being too frightened to actually go and see him-- was at his side every day.

Should we dismiss the picture for its lack of accuracy, or call the news story a slanderous hoax directed at an international boxoffice success (funny how people rarely if ever sue an international boxoffice failure)? I say this: the truth must out, the truth must be known and told and retold alongside the film's screening venue--one must be aware of Bauby's real story, same time one must appreciate the film's many felicities and innovations. It's a mixed bag of truth and delusion and invention, but then, so is any film, and so are we alll.

Allow me to put it on record, say it aloud as plainly as I can: Le Scaphandre et le papillon is easily the best film of 2007 and Julian Schnabel, with his slim portfolio of films, arguably the finest filmmaker working at the moment.

First published in Businessworld, 10.22.08