Saturday, March 8, 2008

Le Scaphandre et le papillon/The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)

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Fashionable, wealthy and influential, Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby seemingly had it all. Yet, when he suffered a stroke driving in his convertible in the middle of the French countryside, leaving his beautiful country home, one wonders if the damage he eventually suffered could have been averted if he had been closer to immediate medical assistance. We meet Bauby when he first wakes up in the hospital, where he discovers he has been in a coma. The doctors' standard questions soon turn to concern as the extent of the damage Bauby has suffered becomes apparent. He is diagnosed with Locked In Syndrome – a rare condition in which the brain retains all cognitive function but is unable to communicate with the rest of the body – and the once worldly Bauby is now confined to a wheelchair, unable to even speak.

The masterstroke of Julian Schnabel’s film, is that it refuses to stay confined by Bauby’s physical condition. Based on the titular memoir by Bauby - composed entirely by communicating to his speech therapist by blinking his left eye to identify letters as she reads them down from a chart in order of popular usage - Schnabel’s film pushes its setting far beyond the hospital doors, capturing the endlessly fertile thoughts spinning in Bauby’s head. While the film does focus on Bauby’s health and his care, celebrating his struggle and accomplishment in penning the novel, it never flinches from presenting his troubling relationships with the women in his life or the seemingly vacuous nature of this job at the magazine. Both before and after the accident, Bauby is presented as smart, sarcastic, funny, a jerk and a warm-hearted friend. We see him for everything he is from a dedicated son in the moving and heart wrenching scenes with his father (played magnificently by Max Von Sydow), to a callous, selfish man as he continues to juggle relationships between his lover and his wife, even from his hospital bed.

Largely filmed from Bauby’s point-of-view perspective, it’s no surprise that Julian Schabel comes from an art background. He finds compelling and beautiful ways to both capture to the terror of Bauby's condition and the beauty of his imagination. Using his painter’s eye, and working alongside noted cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell & The Butterfly is a film that – like its subject – uses its limited resources to maximum effect. It refuses to be bound by conventions, and leaps boldly and beautifully to piece together the memories of a decadent life that finds its meaning in the gravest of tragedies.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

À bout de souffle/Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

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When Jean-Paul Belmondo’s fedora wearing, cigarette chewing Michel Poiccard declares at the beginning of the film that he is an “asshole”, he’s not kidding. A womanizing, self-absorbed, wannabe criminal, he spends his days making schemes and his nights chasing skirts. He idolizes Humphrey Bogart but carries none of his charm or gentlemanly manners. Poiccard's foil is the shatteringly gorgeous Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American student in Paris, and the only woman who resists his carefully constructed persona.

What continues to make Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film so fresh and exciting nearly fifty years since its release, is its unguarded ambition. The thin plot, in which Poiccard murders a policeman and goes on the run, is merely a foundation for screenwriter François Truffaut to use his characters as a platform to expound a world of ideas on France, politics, love, sex, women and philosophy. In fact, the film’s central sequence – and also its longest - does absolutely nothing to move the plot forward. It is simply Poiccard and Franchini in her apartment talking, arguing, insulting each other, espousing opinions, smoking cigarettes, and making love.

If Poiccard is a mess of bravely stated contradictions, Franchini’s purposely elusive sexuality is almost sinister. Franchini openly courts other men, coyly dismisses Poiccard’s advances yet ends up running into his arms. She follows him as he evades a police manhunt, yet her true intentions remain secretive until the final frames. For both Poiccard and viewer alike, it’s difficult to parse what Franchini’s true intentions really are. Does she really love Poiccard or is she just curious about what it's like being with a bad boy? Does she want to be a journalist or does she simply enjoy being the focus of powerful men’s eyes? Ultimately, the two are perfect for each other, as both are so caught up in their carefully arranged personalities, they lose track of who they actually are.

However, to write off Poiccard and Franchini as simply immature would be to miss the point entirely. Breathless resonates because it captures the exuberant energy of being young and in love, and embracing hardline convictions about anything and everything even when it’s coupled with a certainty in nothing. With a playful, casual spirit Godard both celebrates and repudiates the impulsiveness and naivete of youth in equal measure, but is always in full admiration of its unquenchable energy.