Pretty, huh?
(This review and the one I’m linking to contain some spoilers–the plot isn’t exactly full of twists and turns, but just in case.)
***
I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or Le scaphandre et le papillon) this evening. I was not aware–or had spaced–that Bauby had passed away a decade before the movie premiered, and I’d been wondering what kind of collaborative input he might have had during the making of the movie. I also haven’t read his book yet, and am curious to do so now.
I was very interested in how the filmmaker used the medium to portray a firsthand experience of disability. Rather than portray the disabled body as abject to the audience, Schnabel makes the audience start from it:
When Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) awakens from a coma at the outset of “Diving Bell,” a doctor asks him to speak. And though he can hear his voice ricocheting around inside his head, nothing comes out of Bauby’s mouth. That grim rictus – once used to enchant the most beautiful women in France – now looks like a puddle of melted candle wax dripping down Bauby’s chin.
This isn’t quite right. The “cerebrovascular accident,” as the subtitles put it, paralyzed and altered Bauby’s face: it dragged down his mouth on the left side, and is an obvious contrast to the way he looked before. Bauby’s mute mouth is something the filmmaker returns to over and over again–when we are not looking out of his eyes, we are looking into his face: his immobile mouth, his seeking eye.
(I didn’t react to it the way this reviewer did. I saw strain and difficulty; I did not see an ugly or blasted visage.)
(It was just the one eye, his left–his right had to be “occluded”–stitched shut. That scene is one of the most wrenching in the movie. The audience sees the procedure through Bauby’s disappearing eye while Bauby pleads with the surgeon to stop.)
However we may see it, we don’t actually see it for quite a while. The only thing the audience sees for several scenes–I’m wishing, now, that I could review this on DVD, but enough belated commentary–is exactly what Bauby sees. We have no idea what his mouth looks like, because Bauby has not yet looked into a mirror. In fact, we first see his face because he is wheeled past his reflection: we encounter it along with his reaction to it, and no one else’s. There is no immediate shock at his appearance.
This is the truly amazing thing about Scaphandre (originally scripted in English, according to IMDB): the camera teaches us to identify with the protagonist first and always, not with the characters reacting to his catastrophic injury or the severe disability he must negotiate afterwards. The first thing we see is not a body lying in a hospital bed. Our first view is of hospital staff. Throughout the movie, we see people looking at Bauby–that is, straight into the camera at us–with anxiety, revulsion, confusion, curiosity, compassion, respect, love. We hear his commentary, and they don’t.
The camera does pull back, although we never really leave the inside of our narrator’s head. Even in many of those situations, a removed view is used to convey his perceptions. We see his body from the outside when, for example, he is receiving guests who cannot get beyond his altered appearance, his inability to speak, and who are incapable of talking to him as a result. We see him choking just before he’s told that he has pneumonia.
Scrolling back up to that quoted passage, “ricocheting” is an interesting word choice, too. Bauby cannot speak after the accident; he writes his book by blinking in response to a recited alphabet. Throughout the movie, he speaks in his own head, both as narrator and to the people around him. He’s usually ignored, and often treated as though he can have no wishes to express. But the audience hears his articulate frustration. When an attendant switches off the television as he leaves the room, we know that our narrator was watching a soccer game. We also see that it’s beyond recall.
The tension between his thoughts and his communications is fascinating, particularly since the movie’s story is structured around Bauby’s gradual comprehension of his disability and the genesis, creation, and completion of the book. As a triumph, it is–like the reviewer says–one that has the potential to transcend the mawkish inspiration trope. The story’s hope is that Bauby will be able to communicate his experience of his disability in his own narrative voice.