I saw the preview of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” on Sunday night with my famous friend. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s novel, dictated painstakingly and arduously with only the use of his left eye is one of my favourite books. It is passionate, moving, funny and desperately sad. I am not sure I can say the same for the film. It seems to me that it is more a platform for Julian Schnabel to demonstrate his arty camera angles. It was clever and innovative to present it through the eye of Jean-Dominique, almost as if we were actually in his head. He definately managed to successfully present the horrendously claustrophobic “locked-in” syndrome, especially during the scene where they sew up his right eye and you see it happening from the inside, out and feel his horror and the terror from within. However, for me, the passion and intelligence of the man was not portrayed in the way that I saw it.
The beautiful prose describing the brutal downgrading of his hopes and dreams that made the book so powerful, the emotion he felt for his children, his father, his wife, his lover and his friends could have been far more powerful. What I was left with was a feeling of overpowering revulsion, because he focused on the slightly freakish image, a body with a warped mouth and an enlarged staring eyeball, rather than focusing on the mind and the soul of the man. I don’t know that Jean-Dominique himself, former editor of Elle magazine would have been happy with the way that he was represented.
