Cannes. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"Until Tuesday, it looked like the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men was the leading contender for the Palme d'Or," writes Charles Ealy at the Austin Movie Blog. "But Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly should prove to be strong competition. The beautifully photographed movie focuses on Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke and became totally paralyzed. But Bauby, who is hooked up to machines to help him breathe, still has his intelligence, his imagination and the use of one eye. And as he lies in his hospital bed, he slowly begins to see a reason to live. He wants to write a book."

Wait right there, counters Jeffrey Wells, who finds it "a passable attempt to render a beautiful, inwardly-directed portrait about what is truly essential and replenishing in life. But the film is neither of these things, and is nowhere close in terms of poetic resonance and emotional impact to Schnabel's Before Night Falls. It's sensitively realized and skillfully made, but it's a movie about a state of nearly 100 percent confinement that itself too often feels confining."

"Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper," rhapsodizes Justin Chang in Variety. "Still affecting, and already sold to a number of territories, bittersweet Butterfly should find a warm worldwide reception upon release from the Cannes cocoon."

A "small miracle," agrees Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "Taking a very different approach to the award-winning 2004 Spanish film The Sea Inside, in which Javier Bardem played a suicidal quadriplegic, the movie boasts an equally fine lead performance, by Mathieu Amalric, and matches that film's broad appeal."

"Told with humour and humanity, The Diving Bell cannot fail to touch any audience," writes Allan Hunter at Screen Daily. "Mathieu Almaric has become one of France's busiest and most dependable performers over the past few years.... Although the role was originally announced for Johnny Depp, it is hard to imagine anyone doing it more justice."

Updates: "No less an eminence than the venerable critic Michel Ciment (he wrote the book on Kubrick, among other things), to whom I was just introduced by the critics' mailboxes at the Palais, agrees with me that Julian Schnabel's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is a pretty solid contender for this year's Palme d'Or," confides Premiere's Glenn Kenny. Then, after explaining this hunch at length: "A colleague I like very much emerged from the film with the precise inverse of my opinion - she seemed angry about the picture, pronouncing it 'silly.' Unfortunately, like those characters in the old Antonioni pictures, we couldn't properly communicate with each other at that juncture. But I'll look for her review, because the last thing I thought this picture was was silly."

At The Cliff Edge, Ray Bennett has notes on the soundtrack, assembled by Schnabel himself.

"In a festival delectably top-heavy with the radical and the visionary, this mundane paean to the indomitable human spirit is what gets everyone all fired up?" wonders Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "[I]t's the real-life story, not the artistry involved in its telling, that does all the heavy lifting here. All Schnabel does is avoid screwing it up."

Updates, 5/23: "'I'm an artist,' the painter and film director Julian Schnabel says, looking very much the part in a worn red-and-black plaid shirt open to the waist. 'I make more money painting one day than I did on this movie. I did it because I had to.'" And Kenneth Turan talks with him for the Los Angeles Times.

"[A]n awesome achievement," declares Matt Dentler. "Schnabel's new film is a 'wow' experience. I may even see it again while I'm here. Rather than play too bleak, I found hopeful and uplifting edges around the dark subject matter."

Updates, 5/24: "Some here have found the film too literal and faithful to the book, but I found it compelling in its simplicity and truth," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is a vivid reminder that all of us, healthy and otherwise, have to live inside bodies that are terrifyingly vulnerable, and when those bodies go wrong, tough questions are raised about our place in the world, about who it is we are now dependent on, and who it is we were dependent upon all along. Bauby's father is played by Max von Sydow, and these scenes between father and son are the most unbearably sad; it is rare to hear not just sniffles in a cinema auditorium, but out-and-out crying. I made my own contribution to this."

"A hot commodity among buyers since its premiere in Cannes earlier this week, the film was acquired for North American distribution by Miramax in a deal announced just today (Thursday) at the festival," reports Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE.

Update, 5/25: "The gross bodily insults inflicted on Mr Bauby, much less the profundity of his grief, are forever being washed away in a tide of carefully aestheticized imagery, all gauzy light, roses and radiant female faces, which reveals more about the aesthete behind the camera than the character before it."

Update, 5/26: "Schnabel uses his painterly sense to illuminate the story without losing its heart," writes Mary Corliss for Time. "Some of the French critics derided the film; perhaps they were affronted that an American dared to poach on French turf. The audience response, though, was rapturous. Will the Jury be as enthusiastic?"

Update, 5/27: When Cinematical's James Rocchi saw the film, "I staggered into the light awestruck, a little moved, my heart and mind both racing with the excitement and power of the film I'd just seen. I ran into a fellow film critic, who wanted a fast take on the third film from painter-turned-director Schnabel, his follow-up to Basquiat and Before Night Falls. 'Imagine a Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry-style film,' I said, 'but with a warm, beating heart instead of cool, detached hipster irony.'"

Updates, 5/29: From Brownsville to Max's Kansas City: Arifa Akbar and Rob Sharp profile Schnabel for the Independent.

"How did [Schnabel] embarrass himself and the Americans watching?" ask Time's Richard and Mary Corliss. "Let us count the ways: 1) lumbered across the wide stage to shake the hands of all 10 Jury members; 2) mispronounced the name of his lead actor (Mathieu Amalric) and the biggest international star in the cast (Max Von Sydow); 3) invoked the pseudo-French song 'Thank Heaven for Little Girls' (from the Hollywood musical Gigi) to acknowledge the film's five lovely supporting actresses, none of them little girls; 4) insulted his host country, then tried to turn it into a compliment ('Many times they say, "The Problem with France is the French," but that's a lie'); and 5) squeezed some sour grapes by saying, 'If I did get the Palme d'Or I was gonna give it to Bernardo Bertolucci, who's been ill. But I didn't, so it doesn't matter.' One or two jury members wince at the oafish display, as if to ask, Is it too late to retract the prize?"

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2007 9:13 AM