by Liz Allen

Created on: December 31, 2008

Having won Festival de Cannes and Golden Globe awards for best director as well as a Bafta award for best adapted screenplay, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly promised to be a treat, although I had been warned to keep a box of tissues handy.

Julian Schnabel directed this film based on the book of the same name, written by Jean-Dominique Bauby. At the age of forty-two Bauby, the editor of French Elle, suffered a massive stroke that left him with an extremely rare condition known as 'locked-in syndrome'. He was totally paralysed other than his left eye, comparing his physical state to being weighed down in a diving suit; his imagination and memory, however, were completely intact and as free as a butterfly to go wherever they wished.

Bauby was able to write the book by having the alphabet read out to him, rearranged in the order of frequency that the letters are used in the French language. Initially a speech therapist and then a woman sent by his publisher patiently read out the letters one by one: Bauby would blink his left eye when the desired letter was read. Thus words and sentences were gradually built up until eventually the book was completed.

The film opens at the Naval Hospital in Berck, near Calais in France, where Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) was transferred having initially been hospitalised in Paris. It is as though we ourselves are trapped in his body and are seeing everything through his eyes and hearing his words, which those around him were unable to do. At first it is the doctors, speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze) and physiotherapist Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia, wife of director Schnabel) that we see peering at us, as Bauby could only see straight ahead of him. Although everyone is at great pains to assure him that they will do their utmost to help him, Bauby understandably wallows in self-pity. An element of humour shines through as he finds attractive women bending over backwards to take care of him whilst he cannot take advantage of the situation.

The self-pity dwindles by degrees as Claude (Anne Consigny) comes every morning at eight to transcribe the ideas that Bauby, or Jean-Do as he is affectionately called, has been drawing up since five a.m. We move away from seeing everything through Bauby's one good eye to viewing him in his hospital bed or wheelchair. Through flashbacks reflecting Bauby's memories and the visits of family and friends, we begin to build up a picture of Bauby's life whilst he himself begins to realise that it

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>