Why are we drawn to films about people with horrible afflictions? Is it sympathy, or merely relief? Better your incurable illness, your pitiable paralysis, than mine? Does a hero suffering from a disfiguring disease not upend our well-known preference for movies with happy endings?
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" raises those questions, but then transcends them, as it does the pictures in whose invisible footsteps it seems to follow: inspiring, sometimes mawkishly told tales of triumph over physical and mental hardship such as "The Elephant Man," "Mask," "Shine" and "My Left Foot."
The film, which was scheduled to open in the South Bay today, will not open until later this month.
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.
A neurologist explains that he's had a stroke and suffers from "locked-in syndrome," a rare condition that has left Bauby's mind entombed in his body, his consciousness trapped like a dog in a car with the windows rolled up. "This is life?" wonders Bauby, who has known so much of it as the editor of one of the world's top fashion magazines.
Left with only two portals to the outside world - his terrified eyes - Bauby is spared any glimpse of himself until after a harrowing scene in which one of those windows is sewed shut to prevent infection. Seeing what is left of him, Bauby thinks, "I look like I came out of a vat of formaldehyde."
The movie has been going on for at least half an hour before we see Bauby fully for the first time, but this isn't a big "aha!" moment, as when we see John Merrick's disfigurement in "The Elephant Man." Director Julian Schnabel uses his skill as a painter to assemble a collage of fantastical images - including icebergs calving from glaciers, Napoleon's wife and the ballet dancer Nijinsky leaping down a hospital corridor - to reveal the exquisite physical wreck that Bauby has become.
What the real Bauby accomplished was so unlikely that it must have seemed a hoax when "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was published in 1997. To "dictate" that memoir about the aftermath of his stroke - one letter at a time, each word slowly assembled by blinking as someone sitting at his bedside scrolled through the alphabet - surely was equal to any escape imagined by Bauby's literary hero, the Count of Monte Cristo.
Describing himself in the memoir as "a castaway on the shores of loneliness," Bauby relies upon a retinue of women to give him speech, and thus release him from his confinement. Even though he is no longer editor of the French fashion magazine Elle, he earns the devotion of his speech therapist, Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), then the beautiful eye-blink stenographer, Claude (Anne Consigny).
There's a remarkable scene in which Croze's character becomes infuriated with Bauby and storms out of the room. Moments later she returns, apparently unexpectedly, but because Schnabel often keeps the camera running to allow the actors room to think in character and improvise, he catches Henriette's extraordinary speech - none of which was scripted.
Bauby's dispatches from the lee shore of the life he once knew don't sound self-pitying, just acutely aware of the meaning of what is left to him. Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood turn that into a compelling exploration of being and consciousness.
But if it helps to make "Diving Bell" sound less like a high-minded art film, think of it as a French version of the hit TV show "Lost," in which the castaway's predicament is established, then we see flashbacks from the life that brought him to the coast of loneliness.
At one point, his 92-year-old father (Max von Sydow), an invalid likewise marooned in his distant apartment, calls on the speakerphone at his son's bedside. Confounded by the rapid recitation of letters of the alphabet that makes conversation nearly impossible, the old man cries out that they should become captives together, the two of them imprisoned in his flat, where they could at least see each other until their lives are ended. And suddenly you realize what it's like to be beyond words, incapable of speech. And all you can do is blink.
'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'
Rated: PG-13 (nudity, sexual content and some profanity)
Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny
Director: Julian Schnabel
Writer: Ronald Harwood (based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby)
Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes
In French with English subtitles.
Contact Bruce Newman at email@example.com or (408) 920-5004.