Julian Schn­abel is an artist turned film­maker, evi­dently pre­oc­cu­pied with the lives of other artists and writ­ers: Jean-Michel Basquiat in Basquiat, Reinaldo Are­nas in Before Night Falls, and now Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly. Sev­eral years ago, This Dork Reporter designed Fine Line Fea­tures’ offi­cial web­site for Before Night Falls. But frankly, I had trou­ble work­ing up the enthu­si­asm to watch a biopic (absolutely not one of my favorite gen­res) about a tetraplegic. But please do not be dis­suaded by the admit­tedly depress­ing sub­ject mat­ter. The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly is utterly beau­ti­ful in every way, and moved this hard­ened Dork Reporter to tears in the end.

Math­ieu Amal­ric (who resem­bles a more sym­met­ri­cal Thom Yorke) plays the real-life Bauby, a fash­ion mag­a­zine edi­tor who suf­fers a stroke. He sur­vives with “locked-in syn­drome,” the prover­bial fate worse than death: near-total phys­i­cal paral­y­sis but with full men­tal fac­ul­ties intact. In the true spirit of a French film, Bauby is sur­rounded by beau­ti­ful women. No less a French hot­tie than Emanuelle Seigner plays Céline, the estranged mother of his chil­dren. In a moment of bit­ter­sweet humor, the despon­dent post-stroke Bauby is par­tially con­soled when he first meets his two utterly gor­geous phys­i­cal and speech ther­a­pists (Marie-Josée Croze and Anne Consigny).

The cam­era loves Emanuelle Seigner

Accord­ing to the DVD bonus fea­tures, screen­writer Ronald Har­wood con­ceived of the pow­er­ful visual device of using the cam­era as Bauby’s point of view, sim­u­lat­ing his sole means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion: blink­ing. He is, bless­edly, able to move one eye, and painstak­ingly dic­tates his biog­ra­phy let­ter by letter.

The sound­track is excel­lent, includ­ing Tom Waits, Joe Strum­mer (a really great song, new to me, called “Ram­shackle Day Parade”), and the best pos­si­ble use of U2’s “Ultraviolet.”

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Offi­cial movie site: www.thedivingbellandthebutterfly-themovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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