Before his accident, Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) had what you might call a glamourous

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

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In any film that depicts a lifetime of disability, there needs to be a moment of triumph. We need that cathartic scene to carry us from the cushioned theatre seat to our car parked half a block away for the three-block drive home. Or at least, that’s the conventional thinking when it comes to films about disability. And, as gorgeous and lyrical as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, the film clings to those moments of catharsis. Yet, it ends with the tragedy that it begins it, accompanied by a majestic shot of a disintegrating glacier. The human spirit will still triumph, but The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is more a eulogy to a creative voice we barely knew.

Ladies’ man. Connoisseur of the finer things in life. A man who lives like he drives, and the embodiment of other life-affirming clichés. And then, former Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) wakes up in a naval hospital. A stroke has left him paralyzed from head to toe, trapped in a rare condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” The film depicts Bauby’s time in hospital as he struggles to recover some semblance of his former life. Director Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls) ensures we accompany Bauby through his struggle, his new status quo inescapable for us as Schnabel locks the camera into a first-person perspective. We watch in Bauby’s place as a doctor stitches shut one of Bauby’s eyes while prattling about a ski trip, watch as orderlies bath him like a child. It’s a completely unflinching and somewhat harrowing experience, grounded only by Bauby’s narration.

What usually would end up as a montage sequence in a far lesser film forms the structure of this one. Rather than obsess over melodrama, the film deals in the mundane details of Bauby’s new life, like a nurse unknowingly controlling the rest of Bauby’s day by changing the TV channel, or his learning to communicate through a series of blinks. As Bauby adjusts, reaching for that moment of catharsis, Schnabel opens up the camera. No longer completely confined just to Bauby’s head, we’re taken into his imagination with some gorgeous nature footage of the ocean and other breathtaking vistas. The hospital no longer feels so oppressive, the camera expanding through the hospital we’ve only seen through Bauby’s eyes. The only missteps are the attempts at surrealism, which seem like clumsy and literal interpretations of Bauby’s monologue. Thankfully, those moments are few and far between.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on the book Bauby wrote while in the hospital, which was transcribed by an assistant as Bauby blinked every word. It was eventually published two days before his death. It’s an astonishing feat of willpower and discipline, the moment of catharsis we all need lying at the end of that book. Schnabel provides that moment, but he also presents an ode to a man’s imagination unfettered by his disability. Visceral and moving, Bauby himself would have been proud of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.