The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
31 January 2012 |
Posted by Jim Masson |
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - A Review By George Fleeton
Newcastle Community Cinema (NCC), a voluntary, not-for-profit initiative, started life in October 2009 and screens films monthly in the Annesley Hall, the home of the Newcastle Glees Musical Society.
On January 28, a small but transfixed audience watched the 2007 French film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
This is a disaster movie with a difference: a magazine editor in his mid-forties suffers a massive stroke.
Now a victim of locked-in syndrome, he has control only over his left eye, yet he painstakingly dictates his memoir by blinking one letter of the alphabet at a time to a transcriber, and dies a short time after his book is published.
We are in the same territory here as Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1971), David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) and Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot (1989).
Only more so.
This is a true story.
Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of ELLE until struck down in 1995, and of course the film takes liberties with the causes and effects of his crippling disability.
This is inevitable in screenplays adapted from pre-existing texts.
Where this film scores - and it is always sensitive to the feelings of Bauby’s surviving family and friends - is in its clear-cut objective to tell its story from inside the diving bell (Bauby’s analogy for his massively debilitating condition), and then to take us into the realm of the butterfly with its relatively short life span where, as he states, his memories and imagination are fleetingly supreme.
Bauby was insistent that the last fifteen months of his life were not a dead end.
And the film captures his accurate sense of loss and death, by positing the immanence of all life: he can still hear and see (with one eye) and understand, and he invents his own system of communication that is a final consolation to him and to others - and to us, sitting there in the cinematic dark, locked for 112 minutes into our collective, cathartic diving bell.
NCC’s next event is A Weekend with Oscar, on February 25 and 26, during which the following four films will be shown, complete with red carpet, fresh popcorn, a small bar and volunteer staff so friendly as to make multiplexes seem nightmarish: Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, West Side Story and The French Connection.
