Peripheral Beauties: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind + The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

In this lead-up to Christmas (well it's a bit early but yeah, who cares) I'll be ordering my blog posts (sort of) in line with this theme: doing head-to-heads with at least one of the two films having 'wintery' themes, gradually increasing in their 'Christmasy-ness'. First up: Michael Gondry's quirky romantic science-fiction drama 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', and the biography of Jean Domonique-Bauby, 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'. First off I have to say, these two films have some of the most beautiful titles ever. One's quoted from an Alexander Pope poem which automatically makes it awesome, the other's just so beautifully abstract and yet makes so much sense from the opening scenes of the film. Anyway, enough about that because if a film's a drag, no amazing title can save it (see: Shadowboxer starring Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr.. I know, I thought I was in for a treat too).

 

Credit: http://procrastinate2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/cinematography-diving-bell-and-butterfly.html

Let's start at their respective beginnings; both films are very high concept motion pictures in their own different ways, and they throw the audience into the thick of things without much introduction from the outset. The first 36 minutes or so of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is told entirely from the paralysed first-person perspective of Jean Domonique-Bauby (Mathieu Almaric), editor of ELLE, as he lies in a hospital bed, is wheeled around in a wheelchair, etc. all from the view of his eyes--and soon, just the left eye, for fear of infection of the right due to irrigation. This all allows for director Julian Schnabel of course, to have a great deal of fun with his directorial style, as within the static POV of Bauby people and images flit around the screen, magnified and diminished based on their proximity to Bauby, voices of visitors and hospital staff are modulated at different volumes even at the same distances. Low dutch angles to show his bedridden position, as well as deep focus on the faces of people while blurring the background in different shades, are all very effectively used to show Bauby's feelings of physical confinement. Here's a really good website which shows the imagistic disorientation the film beautifully achieves: http://evanerichards.com/2009/415

Bauby's physical limitations are vividly conveyed by Schnabel, and you certainly get that repressive feeling from both the frustrations of the man himself, and the sadness of his loved ones when they come visit, but one thing I rather love about the film is that it does not compromise one of the best elements of the original source material: humour. I'll get onto Mathieu Almaric's performance in a bit, but there's never that sense of looming, excessively depressive air to many films of this sort, instead there retains that dreamy, wry sort of style to Schnabel's approach and the internal dialogue of Bauby that helps make this somewhat oppressive peripheral vision from within an man's head, oddly engaging and comfortable.



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With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as is typical with a Charlie Kaufman script we begin proceedings in a very muted sort of way. Following Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey, in an incredibly subtle turn for the usual overactor) on his way to work (or is he?), director Gondry films the opening scenes of the film in such a casual, breezy way that upon re-watches one is all the more impressed by how he resists the urge to make any sort of immediate 'impact', so to speak. Everything just chugs along quite nicely as we're treated to a 'meet-cute' between Joel and Clementine (Kate Winslet). It's a Valentine's Day we're in but a very casual-feeling one as Kaufman's script carefully scripts around the central concept of the film (I'll get to that in a bit), making everything very normal while leaving hints here and there of something altogether more of an oddity. 'Why is it that I fall in love with every girl who shows me the slightest bit of attention?' bemoans Joel--oh how the feels come up every time I watch the film, delivered with the normality of the everyday musing it is.



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Clementine is very much the archetypal 'Manic Pixie Girl' audiences have all generally grown to love/hate/been indifferent to the trope surrounding it, and from the audience's POV she's all the more luminous in comparison to the reserved Joel. Winslet's performance here is excellent as she does not really disappear into the role, rather she uses the inherent star quality she has to all of her performances and really makes Clementine into her very unique sort of quirky love interest: very off-kilter, constantly changing topics (and hair colour), and you (and Joel) are immediately drawn to her. Which makes everything that follows, resonate all the more strongly.

After the opening third or so of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly we move out of not only Bauby's POV, but also occasionally make detours into Bauby's past, giving Amalric a bit more 'space' for his performance insofar as character creation is concerned. To be honest though, even without these flashbacks, Amalric would still have given a magnificent performance in my books. His voiceover alone is worth the price of admission as it's just so in line with the voice of Bauby I had in my head when reading the book: sly, cheeky, and definitely a bit of a rogue, but with that tinge of poetic appreciation with not only the beautiful things in life, but also finding beyond the surface just anything to remark upon, and find the complexity within. 'I decided to stop pitying myself', remarks Bauby at one point, and this is marvellously conveyed within Amalric's performance through the gradual progression of his inner voice from grudging acceptance of his fate, to a newfound appreciation of life from his limitations of view.

Equally impressive is his physical performance: like Eddie Redmayne in the recent The Theory of Everything, he shows the disabilities of the man so well and accurately, and somehow within these limitations finding ways of showing emotion through just his eyes. It's performances like this that really show to me an actor is great, or has potential to achieve greatness. Conrad Veidt and John Hurt, in The Man Who Smiles and The Elephant Man, achieved magnificent feats of acting with just the use of their eyes: it's one of the reasons why I'm constantly on the lookout in hope that Amalric will find better roles suited to his talents, or why The Theory of Everything proved to me that Eddie Redmayne is the next big thing.

Credit: Zachary Gerberick https://www.youtube.com/user/gerberzy/videos

It's certainly not a one-man show though: there's of course Schnabel anchoring everything magnificently, structuring the film's back-and-forth linear plotting wonderfully and showing both the degradation of the body and the elevation so well by the different lightings he uses in certain scenes, the aura of dreaminess he gives to the scenes he's playing with his family to the blunt, unsparing tone to the scenes where Bauby questions his faith, or has his stroke. The montages he uses never feel extraneous, but so mellifluously convey the state of Bauby's mind. The rest of the cast is very solid too: Emmanuelle Seigner is terrific in a limited role as his loving wife, Marie-Josée Croze and Anne Consigny are stellar as Bauby's bedside confidants (and absolutely stunning to boot), Issach de Bankole and Niels Arestup poignantly fill the shoes of smaller but no less impactful friends of Bauby, but the star of the lot is definitely Max Von Sydow as Bauby's father, whose one big emotional scene is just a killer.

There aren't really any big emotional scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and they really wouldn't have fitted in with the way the film progresses. I'm not going to give too much away; half of the enjoyment of watching the film is just being perplexed by what's going on, and not having things explained to you but sort of blindly feeling your way around, till you grasp at the beautiful heart of what Gondry is getting at: love. Love, love, love. Joel, so it goes, has undergone a memory erasure process. Very Philip K. Dick-esque, eh? Well, not really. That too is grounded and made real in its very own way, and really the main point of it all is to get a retrospective look into Joel and Clementine's relationship--who as it turns out, he has met, and dated for two years before. It's here where Gondry's style really lets loose: take this scene here.

Credit: Movieclips https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3gNmTGu-TTbFPpfSs5kNkg

As we go back further and further, the film gets deeper and deeper, and what I really enjoyed about the film is that it never really loses that dreamy edge, but rather uses it to add poignancy. As we move into happier days and more nostalgic moments of the relationship, we grow uneasy and unhappy about them being lost forever. It's heartbreaking stuff. I cried multiple times throughout Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as I did with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Not because they're weepies or anything, but because with such peripherally limited visions (the inside of Joel's and Bauby's heads) we find such beauty in perception, and in the former watch it ruthlessly taken away, and the latter find it so heartrendingly cherished before Bauby's demise. The endings of the two films are quite different in terms of the tone, with Schanbel opting to end on a high note while Gondry chooses to, after the emotional toll of the 'final' scenes within Joel's brian, to end on a quiet one. I haven't really done full justice to either of them, but I can assure you, watch them both, watch them to the end. Their just beautiful, beautiful works of motion picture art.