Cynical Cinema

One of the best musical releases this year is Lou Reed’s Berlin, a concert film directed by Julian Schnabel, the man responsible for last year’s magnificent The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Alliance Films releases the DVD this week, on October 21st. It’s a concert movie shot at St. Ann’s warehouse in Brooklyn in 2006. Reed is performing his album Berlin live for the first time. The story of the album would actually make for a fantastic documentary in itself. Released in 1973, it was an abject failure, both critically and commercially. As an artist who never really cared about critics, or commercial success, one would assume that Reed was fairly unconcerned with the fact that Berlin entered the world as a total flop. But since 1973, Reed has rarely played any material from the album at all, let alone the entire album, the way he does here.

Full disclosure here - I am a huge fan of Berlin. I think it’s one of the great records of the 1970s, and it has been underappreciated for years. It speaks, as Schnabel says, of the impossibility of love. Sure, it’s overblown. And sure, it’s dark and artsy and all of that. But then, that’s Lou Reed. And near the end of 2006, the album was resurrected by Reed and some stellar guest musicians in a five-night stand at St. Ann’s. Those five nights were captured on film by Schnabel, and made into a truly remarkable concert movie. It isn’t just Reed performing on the stage, although that is of course the best part. Schnabel inserts footage of Emmanuelle Seigner, the gorgeous star of The Diving Bell And the Butterfly, into the film. He shoots her as the star of the album, the “Caroline” who is the central character of Reed’s opus. And although he uses her sparingly, Seigner’s presence alone gives added impact to the lyrics and music of Reed.

I will say this - Berlin is for Reed fans, most of all. You must like Lou Reed. He must be a guy you would pay to see in concert. Because he does have a gravelly, rather monotone delivery, and if you don’t like him specifically you could get pretty bored pretty fast. But if you are a Reed fan, you’re into him for the music and the lyrics and the tone of his music. And Schnabel has done a better job of capturing that tone and that feel than I ever imagined possible. The teaming of the two is sheer genius. The special features are kind of weak, with a very short clip of Reed and Schnabel on Elvis Costello’s talk show being the highlight. But the film itself is wonderful, and a must for any fans of Lou Reed.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a magnificent film. It’s the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a man who had the world at his fingertips. He was the editor of French Elle magazine, rich and reasonably famous and with a great son and a series of hot women at his beck and call. Then, all of a sudden at the age of 43, Bauby was stricken by a sudden stroke that left him completely paralyzed. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t chew food, he couldn’t move a muscle in his body except for his left eyelid. All he could do was blink his left eye. His mind, however, still functioned as well as ever, and he was able to do something extremely remarkable. Through the assistance of several people, he was able to dictate his life story and memoirs through only the blinking of his eye.

In this movie, “diving bell” is a fairly non-literal translation of the French title, which is “La Scaphandre et La Papillon”, which means, more accurately, the diving-suit and the butterfly. The diving suit refers to the way Bauby feels, trapped inside his own body, like a deep-sea diver stuck hundreds of feet under the ocean. The butterfly is his escape from this hell, like a butterfly’s escape from a cocoon, through this work he is dictating. The movie is in French, and ought to be watched in French (with English subtitles if necessary). The letters he uses to dictate his work are far more effective when you hear them in the French language. And although this sounds incredibly boring (so much so that my girlfriend refused to watch this with me), a guy blinking for an hour and forty minutes, it isn’t. And although his dictation takes up the bulk of the narrative, the flashbacks to the scenes in his life that play out through his words are wonderful.

There is also (which is fitting for this character) an abundance of really hot women around him in his hospital room. Olatz Lopez Garmendia as his physical therapist Marie, Emmanuelle Seigner as his ex-wife Celine, Anne Consigny as Claude, the woman taking his dictation, and the luminous Marie-Josee Croze as his speech therapist, Henriette. Of course, having gorgeous women around him all the time, waiting on him hand and foot (and butt and armpit and pretty much his entire body) is the last irony to his life, since he can do nothing in response except blink. We hear his own narrative inside his head, and he develops a sense of humour about this situation and his frustration at being unable to use his body. He also develops a vivid imagination, imagining things he used to love, and on occasion imagining himself having affairs with all these women. So there are lots of naked boobs.

Of all the flashback scenes, there is one in particular that stuck with me. His new girlfriend (he has just left his wife and son for this woman) takes him on a trip to Lourdes, where she wants to be blessed by the holy water that apparently heals the sick and transforms people. Bauby, however, is a skeptic and an intellectual, and wants nothing to do with this holy water and religious mumbo-jumbo, and even less to do with the gaudy Jesus-and-Mary souvenir shop. When his girlfriend buys a horrible flashing neon Madonna, and places it by the bed, he decides that’s it, he’s got to leave her. The scene is a powerful one, because we wonder - is this what the movie is trying to say? That this happened to him because he rejected religion? But later we understand that this is just who he is, and he will always find religion to be amusing at best, and even in his decrepit state, he won’t succumb to that “finding religion” thing that people do under similar circumstances.

Max Von Sydow appears in the movie as his father, and gives a wonderful performance that really accentuates the dynamic between the father and his son, and casts a light on Bauby’s relationship with his own boy. There is a recurring theme in the film about the Count of Monte Cristo, in this case a book Bauby was planning to write based on that classic. In Bauby’s version, he was planning to make the lead character female, and create a sort of female-revenge novel. Of course, this never ends up happening, because of the stroke, but this idea he has gives us a window into his soul and into his brain. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is absolutely magnificent, beginning to end. And it’s also one of the only movies I have ever seen where those obnoxious dream sequences actually work and make sense.