The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The astonishing true-life story of Jean-Dominic Bauby -- a man who held the world in his palm, lost everything to sudden paralysis at 43 years old, and somehow found the strength to rebound -- first touched the world in Bauby's best-selling autobiography -The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (aka -La ...more

The story of former French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is an extraordinary one. After a stroke afflicted him with locked-in syndrome, a condition which robbed him of speech and mobility, save for the capacity to blink his left eyelid, the fashion chieftain saw his once cosmopolitan lifestyle come to a halt. Yet Bauby, or Jean-Do as his closest friends called him, was still fully cognizant and articulate, and with the assistance of a transcriber he managed to dictate his ...more

Julian Schnabel danced up to the edge of greatness in Basquiat and Before Night Falls. With The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he plunges in headfirst. To call this a sophisticated achievement is a massive understatement, failing to appreciate how much nuance, warmth and uniqueness of perspective is poured into Schnabel's third film. The fact that it's shot in French, a foreign tongue for the director, only adds to the feat. "Language," in the abstract sense, interests a visual artist like ...more