Review of "The Diving Bell and the Sea"

In early 17th century it wasn’t uncommon for painters to convceive of their painings as “pendants”: paired images, meant to be displayed side-by-side, with the full force and meaning of their content brought to focus by mutual juxtaposition and contrast. They were “images in a paradoxical relationship with one another, images that are at once both cohesive and separate, the same and different.” (reference) It seems to be yet another unnecessarily complex baroque conceit, and yet, it actually works, sometimes quite brilliantly…

CONTINUE >>> Such is the case of Velazquez”s Forge of Vulcan, and its companion Joseph’s Blood-Stained Coat. Both pieces, painted during the painter’s first trip to Rome, despite their diametrically different sources (classical versus biblical), have the same subject: bodies an faces with their expression frozen by a shock of severe emotional distress: a husband finding out he has been betrayed by Venus, his wife; and a father who learns of the death of his most beloved son, as his brothers bring the sad news, and a (false) proof.

I could not resist the feeling that in more than one way, and of course quite unintentionally, by sheer chance, Julien Schnabel’s film Le scaphandre et le papillon is a pendant to Amenábar’s earlier Mar adentro. Both deal with the same subject: a life of a previously bon-vivant, vibrant, care-free, and intensely sexual man, after it has been irrevocably altered by a cruel turn of fate, an accident that leads, in both cases, to complete paralysis. There are so many connecting points here: both “characters” are real; both stories are largely factual and non-fictitious; both Jean-Do and Ramón Sampedro are writing a book about their experience, both need help of others (in both cases, women) to make it happen; and both men are surrounded by attractive women whose presence only painfully reminds them of the all-too-obvious impossibilities; both fantasize. Both reflect on their condition and express these thoughts through their writings. In both films, emotional climax occurs in extremely poignant scenes: each man’s brief (and heartbreaking) conversation with his elderly father. In both films, there are religious references, neither one favorable, and both narratives use the the sea as a symbolic presence. And even though both films technically end the same way (in both, the main character dies at the end), each story reaches the same conclusion by moving in exactly the opposite direction: while Ramón Sampedro desperately wants to die, Jean-Do equally fiercely, tenaciously, holds on to life, blink by blink, hanging on by the thinest of thin threads: a line of sight.

Le scaphandre is, without any doubt, the more ambitious of the two, more daring, less didactic, more uncompromizing, more gut-wrenching, and completely hypnotic (couldn’t even pause it for 5 minutes). The concept is less mainstream; the writing is more aggressive and quite direct; emotional ups and downs are brutal; the tempo and the timing are like oddly syncopated music, rather challenging to follow, but not without their rewards; and Janusz Kaminski’s camera is in every detail as masterful and expressive as Velázquez’s brush. And just like Velázquez’s two pendant paintings, each of these two movies is enriched and polished by the comparison with the other. They are both serious and dark, but outstanding films. Le scaphandre… is definitely the one not to be missed.

Le scaphandre et le papillon is available on Netflix on-demand (streaming) and on DVD.