“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” may very well have won Julian Schnabel the Academy Award for best director for the year 2007 but there are films which are honoured by the omnipresent humanism transcending to reside in the viewers for a long time. That is inestimable. Based on the book of the same name written by the French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, it tells his memoirs of his condition which left him completely paralyzed except for hearing, cognitive abilities and one eye to blink. With that he completed the book and in his imagination which becomes quintessential in his scenario finds peace in his final days.Death is the fear for everyone and yet we take it for granted. Because constant thought of it puts a person in paranoid and depressive state. The thought of non-existent and the thought of something loved not existing scares every one. The consequence and the future of the result are known to every human. But living death is something unknown. The condition Bauby faithfully represented by actor Mathieu Amalric even in thought of us immediately comes to the obvious conclusion of being insignificant to continue the life. So when Bauby in his patient blinking of an eye communicates that to his speech therapist Henriette Durand (Marie-Josée Croze), we know that coming. Durand with anger due to witnessing hope given up easily is one of several confronting realities of miracle forgotten in every one’s life. And Croze who in her sunk and sullen eyes in “The Barbarian Invasions” pulls up another angelic character which is required to shed the hope to an abysmal situation characterized by our weakened life.
There are only few scenes where director Schnabel allows us to see the full aerial view of a location and the characters. Rest is basically the view of Bauby and as him we are agitated and feel deeply helpless on the inability to see what we want to see. The communication which is impossible for any fully functional person but is the only way to understand Bauby is challenging as a film as it went for the real players and the man himself, Jean-Dominique Bauby. The blurry vision soaked by his wet eyes to see his young son wipe his saliva, the tired eyes which knows the end of the pleasure of feeling the thighs of the attractive women are not one would like to go through. The immediacy of one’s trouble is the things he/she would never get to feel again in every possible senses allowed to humans. The situation of Bauby questions our faith in taking things for granted. Do we need to question it? Obviously we should and in the shines of the impossibility, if all of us can master that as instincts when we begin to hate and dislike, things would make our life worthwhile.
Seeing Bauby’s past mould into the uncontrollable emotional barrier and battle with his wife and mistress has been pictured in unexplainable terms explaining the situation. A father, a son, a husband, a friend and a lover is how it comes down to when evaluating a life, the relationships. The measuring device of our life is the relationship we form with others than the scale from the rule book the world has defined. But there is something more than that to complete our existence, which is the attainment of the self zeal satisfied without any shred of compromise.
It is a tough film to make because it is tough to replicate the imaginations of Bauby but thankfully he drew it out in his book which would have assisted Schnabel a lot. A book written by blinks and the hope to keep the life running, to realize the importance of breathing and appreciate every second of existence. Schnabel’s film is the documentary of Bauby’s mind. We listen to his narrations and take the instant journeys to the far side of the world.
Seeing Bauby reminded me of seeing my father in ICU right after his brain tumour operation and every other day in post operative stage. He was sometimes unaware of the situations but I bet he was fully aware when I saw his eyes of shock and dismay on the surprise of his body not reacting to his brain. I saw it in his eyes when we tried to get him up from his bed to make him sit. My father then went through an ordeal of learning everything a baby would learn from the start. Fortunately for him, he regained almost everything. Bauby does not and to accept that, regain the perception of going on is the hope we take on from this film.
The first and foremost barrier to break away is the self pity in any desperate situation. Bauby tells it in his first dictation for his book to Claude (Anne Consigny) and he makes it sound easy and convincing at the same time, given his state. I resorted and identified my passion in movies and reviews to break away from the self pity of the insatiate nature of the regular chores of completing a day. I forgot the importance of living to relish the music, movies and the control to do what I wanted to when I want to. The current lives of giving an insecure definition for security has only resulted in more fear and has made us small and irritable. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” blares the minds of how miniscule and how great the life is if we allow us to take a mile or thousands of it to conquer the fear of non-existence, even if there is only one muscle is all we can move.
No comments:
Post a Comment