Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

"...a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation.  Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
"...a story of physical entrapment and spiritual renewal into exhilarating images.  David Ansen, Newsweek
"...a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera...  David Denby, The New Yorker
"...a masterpiece in which "locked-in" syndrome becomes the human condition.  David Edelstein, New York Magazine
"Amalric is extraordinary, creating a character literally without moving a muscle.  Ken Fox, TV Guide
"...a rhapsodic adaptation of a memoir, a visual marvel that wraps its subject in screen romanticism without romanticizing his affliction.  Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"...speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.  Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

Editor's Note Celebrated painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel's third feature finds him reaching new artistic heights with this audacious and personal biopic, based on the best-selling memoir of the same name. The film tells the remarkable tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the world-renowned editor of French ELLE magazine, who suffered a stroke and was paralyzed by the inexplicable "locked in" syndrome at the age of 43. Bauby's only way of communicating with the outside world was by blinking with one eye, and after several dedicated helpers--a string of impossibly beautiful women (Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Olatz Lopez Garamendia, Anne Consigny)--helped him to speak through this seemingly irrelevant gesture, he began to produce the words that would form his memoir. Along the way, as he swam in and out of consciousness, memories from his past swelled into the present, resulting in a cinematic experience that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Schnabel somehow manages to convey Bauby's internal life with remarkable clarity, employing first-person perspective, striking cinematography (by the always great Janusz Kaminski), and Amalric's pained, life-affirming monologues. The result is a wholly original experience, a painful and tender portrait of a life that is made all the more exhilarating because of its close proximity to death.

	Emmanuelle Seigner
	Marie-Josee Croze
	Mathieu Amalric
	Max von Sydow
	Janusz Kaminski - Cinematographer
	Jean-Dominique Bauby - Based On Novel By
	Julian Schnabel - Director
	Juliette Welfling - Editor
	Kathleen Kennedy - Producer
	Laurent Ott - Production Designer
	Michel Eric - Production Designer
	Paul Cantelon - Original Music By
	Pierre Grunstein - Executive Producer
	Ronald Harwood - Screenplay

Film Comment
"The result is like a precious art object -- crafted by a painter -- that through emotional wealth and visual invention amplifies the poignancy found on the page." 11/01/2007 p.69

Box Office
"[Schnabel] possesses an imaginative eye that avoids the obvious and mawkish." 12/01/2007 p.55

New York Times
"[Mr. Schnabel] demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty." 11/30/2007

USA Today
3 stars out of 4 -- "[S]urrealistic and inventive. The film version of the best-selling memoir THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY is visually arresting and a tribute to the power of imagination..." 11/30/2007

Rolling Stone
3.5 stars out of 4 -- "[Schnabel's] best film yet, a high-wire act of visual daring and unquenchable spirit." 12/13/2007 p.142

Entertainment Weekly
"[The director] has scattered, layered, and shuffled images to create a very specific universe as sensual as the subject himself described it in hard-won words." -- Grade: A- 12/21/2007 p.56

Los Angeles Times
"[The] imaginative and sensitive film, starring France's gifted Mathieu Amalric, is simultaneously uplifting and melancholy, suffused with an unexpected sense of possibility as much as the inevitable sense of loss." 11/30/2007

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he visual style itself becomes the key element that allows us to understand and admire the way that Bauby's mental vivacity overcomes his physical limitations." 02/01/2008 p.48

Sight and Sound
"[A] delicate and finely judged film....Janusz Kaminski's impressionistic cinematography can't help but seem refreshing..." 02/01/2008 p.61

Uncut
5 stars out of 5 -- "Schnabel has transposed the book thoughtfully and successfully....It's an inspiring and profoundly moving experience." 03/01/2008 p.120

Wall Street Journal
"Julian Schnabel's magnificent French-language film, like its true-life subject, transcends reality's prison with surreal buoyancy." 05/24/2012

ReelViews 9 of 10
For many people, there is no hell more unimaginable than having a healthy, active mind trapped in a paralyzed husk of a body. Some of those in this situation seek a quick end to their misery (as was the case with Ramon Sampedro, whose tale was dramatized in the 2004 feature, The Sea Inside); others fight tooth and nail to regain even the smallest foothold into the life they once knew. With The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel not only wants to narrate the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby; he wants the audience to become immersed in Bauby's world. To this end, he employs cinematographic techniques in ways that have not previously been used in a mainstream, narrative feature. As a result, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly can at times be an unsettling experience...The Diving Bell and the Butterfly triumphs because of its honesty and its refusal to allow the character to wallow in self-pity. Approached differently, this could have been a downer, but Schnabel wanted the film to act as an affirmation of life. He wants us to leave the theater appreciating what we have and what we can experience. Do not be dissuaded by the subject matter. This is a special motion picture that achieves its higher agenda of doing much more than idly plucking at a few heartstrings. - James Berardinelli

Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a film about a man who experiences the catastrophe I most feared during my recent surgeries: "locked-in syndrome," where he is alive and conscious but unable to communicate with the world. My dread, I think, began when I was a boy first reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial" at an age much too young to contemplate such a possibility...The lead performance by Mathieu Amalric exists in two ways, as the unmoving man in bed and the vital man in his memories and fantasies. In that way it is fundamentally different from Daniel Day-Lewis' work in "My Left Foot," about a man who could move only a toe. At least he could lurch and groan and cry. Both films find the inevitable solution to their challenge, and the right actors to meet them...Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer, is in large part responsible for freeing the film from its own dangers of being locked in. From the cloudy opening POV shots of Jean-Dominique regaining consciousness, Kaminski fills the screen with life and beauty, so that it's not at all as depressing as it sounds...At the end we are left with the reflection that human consciousness is the great miracle of evolution, and all the rest (sight, sound, taste, hearing, smell, touch) are simply a toolbox that consciousness has supplied for itself. - Roger Ebert