"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

That's the Jean-Do that was, but Schnabel and his team make us far more interested in the one who is. The early scenes of the movie are filmed not just from Jean-Do's point of view, but from behind his eyes: His blinking becomes the movie's punctuation, its commas and pauses. (Schnabel and Kaminski found that the best way to simulate a blink was to hold two fingers in front of the camera lens in a horizontal "V," closing it at precise moments -- an imaginative and brilliantly organic solution to a technical challenge.) At the beginning of the movie we're inside Jean-Do; later, we float outside him, although the distance between him and us has already dissolved. The Jean-Do we come to know is the one who's being held captive not just in a French seaside hospital, but in his own body. When he half-glimpses his reflection in a window, we see, with the same horror he does, what he really looks like: His head lolls on the cushion of his wheelchair, his mouth is askew, but his one eye is dazzlingly alert. "God, who's that?" he asks, but his next step is to find the gag lurking inside the horrific revelation: "I look like I came out of a vat of formaldehyde."

My mission, if I achieve nothing else, is to impart how resolutely undepressing "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is, while acknowledging that it's also carried by undercurrents of sadness. In a filmmaking climate where screenplays are so often tinkered and monkeyed with that it's obvious they bear little resemblance to what the screenwriter originally put to paper, there's no doubt that Harwood's script is the backbone of this picture. When he was asked, at a press conference, about the biggest challenge he faced in adapting this complex little book, he said, "It took me a while to find a way in because I didn't want the entire film with a man in bed ... Then I found the way in, which was that the camera becomes the man."

That's how you make a screenplay, and a movie, breathe: This picture isn't about the limits of a life, but of its wholeness. We can see the closeness that develops between Jean-Do and his interpreter, Claude (Ann Consigny); the way he teases and flirts with his two pretty therapists, who skim into his room like earthbound angels, hoping to help him speak and move again. (They're played, wonderfully, by Olatz Lopez Garmendia, who is Schnabel's wife, and by Marie-Josée Croze.) Jean-Do is connected to life largely through women, and even though his body has betrayed him, his mind hasn't: He takes great pleasure in getting close-up views of their open-necked shirts (we're not even talking about anything so obvious as cleavage here). And in one deeply moving scene, his ex, Céline, acts as an unwilling intermediary between Jean-Do and his girlfriend. Seigner plays the scene with a faux-coolness that's heartbreaking; she has never been better.

The picture is so beautiful to look at that it's practically buoyant: Kaminski makes it look simultaneously dreamy and alive. And Amalric, who gave one of the finest performances of 2005 in Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen," is marvelous here, in a performance that's anything but interior: As Amalric plays him, Jean-Do's vitality has nothing to do with the shell of a body he lugs around with him. In a dream sequence, Jean-Do (because he quickly realizes that his useless body is no deterrent to his dreams) indulges in a sumptuous feast at Le Duc, and Claude happens to be there too: He beckons her to his table, where they slurp oysters and drink from fat, rounded goblets of wine. This Jean-Do is not the Jean-Do of "now," twisted in his wheelchair, nor is he the Jean-Do of "then," a dashing figure in a tiny sports car. He's a man in between: There he is, smiling, clean-shaven, beautifully groomed, but he's wearing his dressing gown in the middle of a chic Parisian restaurant. In this scene Amalric's face and his body language speak of the pleasure that the Jean-Do of "now" is still capable of feeling, even though his muscles no longer do his bidding.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" suggests -- perhaps it even proves -- that our capacity for joy, and our ability to process it through whatever senses are available to us, are more durable than we think. In his book, Bauby wrote about how although his ability to hear the outside world had been somewhat impaired, the hearing inside his head had changed dramatically. He wrote of being aware of the butterflies "that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: My hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing."

If you've ever seen Schnabel, in pictures or in person, you know he's a portly, unshaven, eccentric-looking guy given to tromping around in pajama-like garments. In interviews, he's Falstaffian, intelligent and a little nuts. But now we also know something else about him: He's a filmmaker with butterfly hearing.

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