Reviews

Films

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Directed by Julian Schnabel, starring Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais, Max von Sydow

Jean-Dominique Bauby was a successful, highly regarded author, a major figure in Parisian journalistic and fashion circles, editor-in-chief of Elle, a father with a little son and daughter, and a mistress, when suddenly he suffered a cerebro-vascular attack while driving in the countryside. Waking from a lengthy coma, he found he was in a hospital at Berck-Plage near Calais, totally paralyzed and capable of communicating only by blinking his left eye, one blink for 'yes', two for 'no'. Using this device, devised by a speech therapist, he dictated his reflective memoir, the 139-page The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (aka Le Scaphandre et le papillon). It was published a matter of weeks after his death in March 1997 at the age of 44.

The picture that the American painter Julian Schnabel has directed is a triumph. It's made in French from a screenplay by the British playwright Ronald Harwood, and stars Mathieu Amalric, who has made a corner for himself as the cinema's favorite quizzical, witty, womanizing Gallic intellectual, and who is wholly convincing as the man his friends called Jean-Do.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly uses a variety of ways to convey the feeling and texture of the book. It begins with Jean-Do coming out of his coma and being told by a neurologist that he's suffering from "locked-in syndrome", and the audience shares his isolation. Only we, the spectators, have an unmediated access to his mind and we understand his frustration at the world going into and out of focus and his inability to frame for himself the picture he sees. Later on, after we've experienced along with him the process of learning a new way of communicating, the film-makers are freed to follow his memories and his imagination as he starts assembling the materials that will make up his book.

Jean-Do's experience is what eventually we'll all come to in the end - spectators in our personal galleries of memories, the dreams, crossroads, transgressions, regrets, joys, disappointments of a lifetime. The film ends, as does the book, with that fateful drive accompanied by his son.

Juno

Directed by Jason Reitman, starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman

With its smart dialogue by newcomer Diablo Cody and a miraculously effective and evocative lo-fi soundtrack, the film has the ephemeral charm of a great pop song. Page plays Juno MacGuff, a hyper-articulate 16-year- old who has cultivated sarky irony to insulate her against the pain and awfulness of being a teenager. In a spirit of experiment she has had sex for the first time with Paulie (Michael Cera), with whom she was once in a band. Paulie was also surrendering his virginity, or as Juno puts it, "going live". As ill fortune would have it, Juno gets pregnant the first time out, and is catapulted in a world of genuine grown-up experience to match and exceed her super-cool mannerisms. Unable to express his deeply hurt and confused feelings, Paulie shrugs and lets Juno do what she wants, and she decides to keep the baby and find a couple for adoption. This turns out to be the uptight yuppies Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner).

Mark is a cool composer with a guitar collection, secretly unreconciled to fatherhood; inevitably he begins a dangerous flirtation with Juno, whose baby threatens to destroy the marriage it was intended to complete, and to undermine Juno's own future in ways she had not begun to imagine. It may be that like Judd Apatow's comedy Knocked Up, Juno will be criticized for neglecting to endorse abortion, or to reflect that this is the option that is the most tenable in real life. The film owes its power to Ellen Page's lovely performance and to Cody's funny script, which treats the subject of status with shrewdness and compassion.

The Guardian

(China Daily 02/19/2008 page20)