Herald Rating:
* * * * *
Verdict:
A bracingly unsentimental adaptation of a memoir of a paralysed man is the most dynamic film in years.
A boisterous and provocative artist who has never troubled to ingratiate himself with anyone, Julian Schnabel is, as a filmmaker, drawn to alienated figures: poet Reinaldo Arenas (as a Cuban and a gay man, doubly isolated) and the neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artistic contemporary of Schnabel's, a man who lived fast and burned out young.
The subject of his new film is as solitary as may be imagined: Jean-Dominique Bauby, in the prime of an enviable life as the editor of French
Elle
, felled by a stroke that leaves him mentally unimpaired, but completely paralysed.
Well, not completely. He retains the use of his left eye which, as he discovers with the help of a sympathetic speech therapist (Croze), gives him the possibility of language: a blink means "yes" and with the use of a board on which the letters of the alphabet are listed in order of frequency, he can communicate.
Which he does: Bauby blinked out (in a mere 14 months) the small masterpiece of the same name that writer Ronald Harwood (
The Pianist, The Dresser
) has adapted here.
Watching the laborious writing process depicted in the film reminds us of the effort that went into it and deepens our appreciation: it is a wry, often blackly funny, breathtakingly honest and hauntingly poetic piece of writing. But as a record of the entirely internal life of a man with what doctors call "locked-in syndrome" - the closest thing to being buried alive - it seemed utterly unfilmable.
Harwood and Schnabel defy the odds, though, in a way few adaptations do: they inhale the original and exhale a work of such stunning originality and technical dexterity that it feels as though they rediscover the medium.
The film, like the book, reveals Bauby to us slowly - which is to say, at exactly the same pace that he becomes visible to himself: thus figures from his former life - including a wife (Seigner) who bore his children - and the people attending on his present predicament come into view only as he allows us to see them. And because his internal voice is audible to us and not to them, the film is full of often-hilarious ironic asides.
That point of view is literal, of course. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski dissolves the distinction between camera and character: when Bauby reflects that, able to do nothing, he can do anything at all, Kaminski's camera takes flight, effortlessly leaping time and space to show us where he's been and where nothing can stop him from going.
Though utterly motionless, Amalric exudes an uncanny, shimmering energy, but this is finally a filmmaker's film, bracingly unsentimental and yet powerfully energising, a triumph of imagination. Paradoxically, an adaptation of a still, quiet memoir of a paralysed man is the most dynamic film in many years.
Peter Calder
Cast:
Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Max von
Sydow
Director:
Julian Schnabel
Running time:
112 mins
Rating:
M
(contains nudity)
Screening:
Bridgeway, Berkeley Mission Bay, Rialto,
SkyCity, St Luke
New York Times: Gripping new thriller looks at a woman whose life is upended by a novel.