Julian Schnabel’s films ask us to share how creative people see and think. We value his attention to their flaws and humour, though his appetite for beautiful images can distract him from the people in them.
Fi1m perspective
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) gives us Mathieu Amalric’s Jean-Dominique Bauby, communicating by blinking but still capable of being funny and difficult. Schnabel does not tidy up his character to make him easier to admire. We recommend the film warmly for that humour and for its willingness to let Bauby resist easy sympathy. His memories and fantasies have room for pleasure, and the direction does not treat that pleasure as an embarrassment.
His first feature, Basquiat (1996), drew on his own art-world experience to tell the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Before Night Falls (2000), adapted from Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir, continued his interest in writers and artists. With The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he brought that interest to the problem of showing a person’s inner life when communication was so restricted. The later At Eternity’s Gate (2018) returned him to a painter, Vincent van Gogh, and to the act of painting itself. Across this work, he uses the camera to suggest what being another person feels like.
In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, editor Juliette Welfling makes the movement between Bauby’s present, memories and fantasies readable without easing the severity of his circumstances. Paul Cantelon’s music supports the warmth, though it sometimes adds emotion the actors have already supplied. Amalric can make the changes of mood clear without that help. We were moved by the scenes with Bauby’s father because his wish to help is so evident and he cannot make things better. Schnabel gives Von Sydow, as the father, enough attention for his distress to matter alongside Bauby’s frustrations.
The reservation is visible in the same film: some of the light, colour and fantasy draw our attention away from Bauby and towards the care taken over the image. We begin inspecting compositions when we ought to be following his thoughts. That is a real distraction, though it does not outweigh the humour or the performances. Start with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and allow Schnabel the occasional image that would have been better left out.
Biography
Julian Schnabel is an American painter and film director. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he studied at the University of Houston and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program before moving to New York.
He began directing in the 1990s with Basquiat (1996), a biopic of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Subsequent films include Before Night Falls (2000), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and At Eternity's Gate (2018). The Diving Bell and the Butterfly won him the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe for Best Director, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
Schnabel first gained international attention in the 1980s for his plate paintings, large-scale works incorporating broken ceramic plates.
