The Decade List: Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007)

Le scaphandre et le papillon [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly] – dir. Julian Schnabel

My disdain for the "docudrama" or the "biopic" is a frequent topic of discussion on this blog, so a retread isn't necessary. Director Julian Schnabel has made his film career out of the genre. His first film looked at the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (Basquiat), and the second was an adaptation of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas' autobiography (Before Night Falls). As The Diving Bell and the Butterfly marks only his third film, it's difficult to say whether Schabel's adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir of the same name completes an unnamed trilogy of artists whose lives were cut too short. Nonetheless, the film continues Schnabel's fascination, approaching Bauby, the former editor of French Elle magazine, with an impeccable perspective that almost completely overshadows the work he did on Basquiat and Arenas.

At the peak of his career, Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) suffers a stroke that renders him almost entirely paralyzed and unable to speak. At the age of 43, Bauby was the editor of the prestigious Elle, a father of three and lover of many women, including his wife Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner) and sometime mistress Joséphine (Marina Hands). The stroke drags Bauby, referred to by his friends as Jean-Do, into what's called "locked-in syndrome," with the only possibility of communicable interaction being in the form of his left eye. In a sort of updating of The Miracle Worker, language specialist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) develops a system of communication through blinking and a utilitarian alphabet, thus prompting Jean-Do to write his memoir through a long series of winks.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, as you probably know, a lot more vibrant that it sounds. With the aid of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who's acted as director of photography on almost every film Steven Spielberg has ever made, Schnabel turns The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into an experiment in perception. A large portion of the film is shot from the viewpoint of Jean-Do's functioning eye; the film inevitably draws up its curtains at the very moment Jean-Do wakes up from his coma. The images are blurry, frustrating and entrancing and eventually form a rhythm of storytelling unlike anything you've likely seen before. It only becomes more apparent how well Schnabel and Kaminski's experiment worked when they do the unthinkable and take the camera outside of Jean-Do's head. I'm still a bit unsure why Schnabel found it necessary to switch the film into third-person, if for no other reason that to remind you how remarkable the film was when it was still communicating in the first.

Ultimately, when you peel off everything and get to its core, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly serves as an especially good example of "well, if you're gonna make a film about [insert your exhausted subgenre of film, in this case an uplifting film about real person who becomes an invalid], you'd be lucky to make it as good as this." The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is less about Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man few Americans probably were aware of before the film came out, than it is about voice and language in film and storytelling. It's at turns dazzling and beautifully chaotic and, at the end of the day, Schnabel's finest foray into infusing his artistic roots into the landscape of film (because, let's face it, the only thing exceptional about Before Night Falls is its lead actor, Javier Bardem, and maybe Johnny Depp as a transsexual... and can you even remember if Basquiat was any good?).

With: Mathieu Amalric, Marie-Josée Croze, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais, Marina Hands, Max von Sydow, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Niels Arestrup, Olatz López Garmendia, Isaach De Bankolé, Emma de Caunes, Jean-Philippe Écoffey, Gérard Watkins, Théo Sampaio
Screenplay: Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Music: Paul Cantelon
Country of Origin: France/USA
US Distributor: Miramax

Premiere: 22 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 31 August 2007 (Telluride Film Festival)

Awards: Best Director, Technical Grand Prize – Janusz Kaminski (Cannes Film Festival); Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film (Golden Globes); Best Adapted Screenplay (BAFTAs); Best Actor – Mathieu Amalric, Best Editing – Juliette Welfling (César Awards, France); Best Director, Best Cinematography (Independent Spirit Awards); Audience Award, European Film (San Sebastián Film Festival); Best Cinematography (Stockholm Film Festival)

The Decade List: Maelström (2000)

Maelström - dir. Denis Villeneuve

Denis Villeneuve certainly has a memorable way for opening his sophomore film Maelström. Enter our narrator, a grotesque nightmarish talking fish, with an Alphaville voice, on a Hostel-like operating table. Enter the heroine, Bibi (Marie-Josée Croze), undergoing a fairly graphic abortion. This might lead you to expect a much different type of film than Villeneuve offers his audience, though perhaps not knowing what should logically follow such an opening is the most accurate approach to Maelström. With a dynamite performance from Croze, in her first leading role, Maelström succeeds in being smart and bratty at the same time, all while moving at a pace and direction that seems all its own. Every plot synopsis I've read of the film differs, so there's no point in trying to describe what happens beyond the introduction. The best moment of the entire film occurs near the hour-mark as Bibi runs toward the plane a man she's just met (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) is boarding, reaching her destination out of breath and telling the man, "I forgot to tell you... I want to have sex with you." That really should've be the end-all of last-minute airport parodies (and it works a lot better than me relaying the scene to you).

With: Marie-Josée Croze, Jean-Nicolas Verreault, Stephanie Morgenstern, Pierre Lebeau
Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve
Cinematography: André Turpin
Music: Pierre Desrochers
Country of Origin: Canada
US Distributor: Arrow Features

Premiere: 29 August 2000 (Montréal World Film Festival)
US Premiere: January 2001 (Sundance Film Festival)

Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress - Marie-Josée Croze, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Genie Awards, Canada); Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress - Marie-Josée Croze, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, Best Sound (Jutra Awards, Québec Canada); Best Canadian Feature Film - Special Jury Citation (Tornoto International Film Festival); FIPRESCI Prize - Panorama (Berlin International Film Festival); Best Cinematography (Montréal World Film Festival)

The Decade List: Ararat (2002)

Ararat - dir. Atom Egoyan

Edward (Charles Aznavour), a director twenty years past his prime, finally has the opportunity to make the film he's always needed to make. His only knowledge of his heritage comes from his mother's tales of surviving the devastating effects of the Armenian genocide. The timing couldn't be better for this type of personal "prestige picture," considering both his declining respectability and the release of a new book by an art historian (Arsinée Khanjian) which explores the work of abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky and his linkage to the historical tragedy which you won't find in any Turkish history books. The film, titled Ararat, is predictably artless, an exploitive piece of important-with-a-capital-i movie making on the level of a made-for-TV Biblical film (is Charles Aznavour a thinly veiled Nicolas Roeg?).

This is the sort of film one might expect with Atom Egoyan's Ararat, the director's follow-up to his notably disappointing Felicia's Journey which covers his own personal ancestry. Unlike the fictitious Edward, Egoyan doesn't concern himself with the details of what happened, despite using a number of historical consultants for the particulars of the film-within-the-film. Rather, the director uses historical tragedy to probe how it relates to those directly and indirectly affected by it. For the central character Raffi (David Alpay), the events separate him from his late father, who was killed during an assassination attempt on a Turkish government official. While their literal separation was a residual of the events in question (made greater by Turkey's refusal to acknowledge it), Raffi's comfortable existence in Canada, nearly ninety years and two generations removed from the genocide, prevents him from comprehending the mentality of what his father was trying to do.

Of Ararat's abundant complexities, the juxtaposition of Raffi's quest in understanding his father with his step-sister Celia's (Marie-Josée Croze) search for justification of her father's death is one of the more surprising examinations. All of Ararat's conspiracy theories lie within her, and none of them directly relate to the genocide. Celia fluctuates between claiming that her step-mother Ani (Khanjian) either pushed him off a cliff or convinced him to do so. Celia assumes that in both Raffi and Ani's minds his father and her first husband's death symbolized honor, dying for a worthy cause, which in turn makes her father's death both shameful and insignificant by comparison.

Egoyan's Ararat never criticizes Edward's Ararat, despite the negative description I gave it above. Egoyan's even postulates a defense for Edward's, despite some disapproval from Ani, who readily admits she doesn't think in the way filmmakers do, in the various "poetic licenses" the film takes in setting and in relation to Gorky. As Raffi watches Ali (Elias Koteas) and Clarence (Bruce Greenwood) act the scene in which the Armenians refuse to cooperate with the Turks, the visualization of the actions forges the pathway to understanding his father's feelings. Through a later dialogue between Raffi and Ali, Egoyan shows us the purpose of a film like Edward's, and through his own film (and despite the problems surrounding Christopher Plummer's final realization), expresses why this isn't the sort of film he would ever make.

With: David Alpay, Christopher Plummer, Arsinée Khanjian, Charles Aznavour, Marie-Josée Croze, Elias Koteas, Eric Bogosian, Bruce Greenwood, Brent Carver, Simon Abkarian, Raoul Bhaneja
Screenplay: Atom Egoyan
Cinematography: Paul Sarossy
Music: Mychael Danna
Country of Origin: Canada/France
US Distributor: Miramax

Premiere: 20 May 2002 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 12 November 2002 (AFI Film Festival)

Awards: Best Picture, Best Actress - Arsinée Khanjian, Best Supporting Actor - Elias Koteas, Best Music, Best Costume Design - Beth Pasternak (Genie Awards, Canada)