Mesmerising

After watching The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, it will be impossible for anyone to leave the theatre without the strongest sense of relief. Not from the film being over but the opposite: relief that you can walk, breathe and touch.

Such a visceral and involving spectacle is this film that one will struggle not to be mesmerised and struggle even harder, as the lights come up and the doors open, not to be overwhelmed by the realisation that they function, they work.

Diving Bell is the third film from artist/cult director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), and will doubtlessly push him further from classification as “painter-who-films” to “filmmaker-who-paints.” Whatever his true calling, this film is the best start to 2008 any cinephile could ask for.

Together with Spielberg’s revered cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich), Schnabel tells the harrowingly true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Almaric), editor-in-chief of French ‘ELLE’ in the 1990s.

Renowned for his fast-paced, womanising lifestyle, he is – randomly, tragically – whacked by a massive cerebrovascular stroke, leaving him wholly and permanently paralysed, except for his left eye.

Whatever cerebrovascular means doesn’t really matter, not as far as the film is concerned. Schnabel doesn’t want to tell a story of medicine. Nor does he, like so many films concerned with disability, want to illustrate a personal triumph in the face of bleak adversity.

What, it seems, he does want to do is discuss freedom, humanity, life, love. Great themes, but found in the smallest of details. Ergo, what does matter is Bauby’s perspective, both literal and metaphorical. And, always the artist, Schnabel cannily bleeds these two together.

Bauby wakes in a hospital with no knowledge of why or how he came to be there and from here Schnabel builds a nauseating introduction to the story.

Shot entirely from Bauby’s point of view, the first half hour of the film – with beautifully crafted focus-fiddling and sickly lighting effects – instils a sense of reassessment of the world on both Bauby and audience alike.