Friday, February 8, 2008
A Diving Bell, Memory, Perspective, and Imagination
One of my definitions of cinema is the ability to create a world unique from our own. The unique world here is the internal reality of French writer and locked-in stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon.) Sure, you can see what Robert Montgomery saw as Philip Marlowe in the 1947 film noir Lady in the Lake or the sequences before Rock Hudson took off his bandages in John Frankenheimer's Seconds eighteen years earlier. But this is different. It may be the closest a filmmaker ever came to creating the first person "I" persona in a film. You come away with the what it must feel like to be about as severely disabled you possibly can be only being able to communicate with the outside world by using one eye. And this eye becomes ours for most of the film.
Drat it! I am dying to talk about the form and structure of how Julian Schnabel uses form and perspective in his story telling. But that would be giving away too much. Those elements are as, if not more, incredibly important to this film, probably more so than plot structure with characters and all that.
I believe what keeps him (and let's face it, to some degree, the film itself) alive is being around incredibly beautiful intense women in his life: ex-wife, therapists, book transcriber, and former lovers. The other is that although he did not have his body he had imagination and memory, and we viewers are also privileged to some expeditions to those territories.
And music, one of those most important of magical formulas for evoking memory, plays an important part in Schnabel's film. My day began listening to Joe Strummer tunes at home in my underwear and ended with Joe singing the first credits song in Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Velvet Underground and Tom Waits tunes are also featured in some sequences in the film to wonderful effect. Schnabel has a sense of music and poetic film images that reminds me of Wim Wenders' work.
Report on Wikipedia said that Schnabel learned French because he deemed there was no way it could be done in English,. This is especially true of a film's dialog consists of his family or the beautiful angels of "Team Jean Do" are spell talking with the blinking man. I think that this film in English would be both travesty and tragedy.
This is a great film. It has visions and wonder and opens a discussion on what film can do and can be, a chat we have not had for sometime. I predict that there will be filmmakers in the future who will take some of what Schnabel did here and they will push it out big further, in a way not unlike what the Nouvelle Vague did with American B gangster films, etc. Godspeed, you of those with Schnabel or Tarrantino or Herzog or maybe even Kubrick or Welles-like powers.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:37 PM
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