The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Worth It for the Credits Alone

Opening today is the extraordinary film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by one of our favorite painters, Julian Schnabel. As you’ve probably heard, the movie follows the life of Jean-Dominique “Jean-Do” Bauby, formerly the editor of French Elle, in the wake of a sudden stroke that leaves him “locked-in,” almost completely paralyzed but mentally lucid. Able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, Bauby ultimately dictated–letter by letter–the 1997 bestselling book on which the film is based.

From the series of 100-year-old X-rays (unearthed by Schnabel in a house a few miles from the French hospital where the film was shot) that serve as the background for the film’s opening credits to the closing slow-motion rewind of ice blue glaciers plummeting into the Alaskan sea, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is visually fascinating, thanks to Schnabel and Janusz Kaminski, the film’s director of photography.

AW+

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