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Julian Schnabel: the eye of the mind: in his film about a man completely paralyzed but for one eye, Schnabel has skillfully interwoven his character's memories with a phantasmagoria of art-historical references and imagery
Art in America, May, 2008 by Brooks Adams
When Julian Schnabers film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opened at the Cannes Film Festival last May, I was amazed at what a French movie the American artist had made. That brilliant cast of European and Canadian actors and actresses assembled around the artist-director on the tapis rouge; the sheer amount of French verbiage expended on the subject of the late Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952-1907), the editor of French Elle who suffered a rare condition referred to even in French as "locked-in syndrome" and who wrote a book about it in 1997, famously dictated by blinking his left eye in response to a carefully devised alphabet; and later the hoopla when Schnabel won Best Director at Cannes--all filled my days and nights in Paris, where cable TV coverage of the festival is a 10-day long, nearly 24/7 affair.
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One of the things that impressed me most when I saw the film in June was the fact that Schnabel had succeeded in getting French regional funding from Nord-Pas de Calais, an area bordering Belgium, where much of the movie was shot in the seaside resort of Berck-sur-Mer. I was particularly bewitched by the way he filmed those Northern coastal locations--the wide beaches, the red-and-white striped lighthouse and in particular the Maritime Hospital, where Bauby spent more than a year. That dour, 1860s brick complex of buildings (somewhat reminiscent of Mass MoCA) and those long, covered terraces along which the patient is wheeled as he gazes out to sea, put me in mind of modern convalescent imagery, even as the film's male subject is visibly and audibly fading away.
Last fall the movie completely disappeared from French circulation, and resurfaced only in early February at my local video store. Even then it was in hot demand and had to be grabbed off the shelves with some alacrity. By then Schnabel and his male lead, Mathieu Amalric, had picked up more French and American awards (Best Director at the Golden Globes, Best Actor at the Cesars, which are the French Oscars), and the movie had found an international niche. Important reviews by David Salle (Artforum) and Sanford Schwartz (New York Review of Books) appeared in the American press, and I was free to sit down and rewatch the movie, as well as his first two efforts, Basquiat (1906) and Before Night Falls (2000), in the comfort of my own kitchen during a winter break. (A fourth movie, Berlin (2007), a filmed evocation of a Lou Reed concert for which Schnabel and his daughter Lola did the sets, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2007 and opened in Paris t in late March.)
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The Diving Bell's sense of place and pacing; its existential concerns, nonchronological structure and impressionistic cinematography--not to mention its nonpuritanical sexual politics--seem plausible today largely because the film was shot in French, and because the screenplay, written by Ronald Harwood in English, remains so faithful to the book's Gallic spirit.
A word about Bauby's book, which I checked out from the library and read on a long train ride to Germany. It proceeds in very short chapters; each reads like a tone poem or meditation. Each was memorized, then dictated letter-by-letter (one blink for "yes," two blinks for "no") to a loyal female transcriber, who, in Schnabel's film, was developed into a full-blooded romantic lead played by the austerely beautiful Anne Consigny.
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The book could be said to belong to the tradition of the nouveau roman--it is certainly all about the construction of the "je" or the 'I' by means of an eye. What a powerful, cyclopean presence that eye becomes in Schnabers film. It's a book that, while challenging to write, is not at all difficult to read. Its poetics--for example, the central distinction between the diving bell, which signifies entrapment in the author's paralyzed state, and the butterfly, which signifies liberation, specifically the liberation afforded, as the author says, by memory and imagination strike me as old-fashioned. Indeed, the author Bauby even has a thing for Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, which he wants to rewrite with a feminine protagonist.
Luckily the book has plenty of rueful humor (all magnified by the voiceover of the marvelous Amalric in the movie), even as it traces the coming to consciousness, and final enlightenment, of a character who clearly has commitment issues. (In the film, his father, played by Max von Sydow no less, scolds him for not marrying Celine, the mother of his children, here luminously portrayed by the quintessential French blonde, Emmanuelle Seigner, a.k.a. Mrs. Roman Polanski.) Bauby is a self-described cad, or rake at least, but in the book, he does make progress.
In Schnabel's movie, Bauby is portrayed, by means of flashbacks, as a dandy in a hurry. In several scenes, he barely has time to take his coat off. After his stroke, in a state of near-complete paralysis, he is decked out in superb bathrobes and pajamas with insistent plaid and check patterns. (These were provided by Olatz Garmendia Schnabel, the artist's wife, who plays Bauby's beautiful physical therapist; she also played the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas's mother in Before Night Falls.) In fact, everyone in the movie wears checks and plaids, which serve as a kind of test pattern for Bauby's bleary vision. (Schnabel himself has a history with plaids and pajamas: consider his late '80s "Tati" paintings on red-and-white checked fabric, appropriated from the down-market French department store, and his extravagantly pajamaed vision of the East Village artist staggering down the street in Basquiat.)
