'Diving Bell and the Butterfly' paints a glorious picture

There's a moment early in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" where the picture suddenly goes blurry. We've been watching the action from the viewpoint of a Frenchman named Jean-Dominique Bauby, a recent stroke victim who is completely paralyzed.

Our first assumption, natural enough, is that he is falling asleep or passing out. Then there's a series of rapid blinks and the awful realization that he's crying.

To feel literally inside another person's tears is hardly an everyday occurrence, but then, director Julian Schnabel's adaptation of Bauby's bestselling memoir is a special film. It rivals the Bob Dylan biopic "I'm Not There" for the title of Most Creatively Constructed Cinema of 2007, but unlike that Bob Dylan film, it's complete.

Jean-Do (Mathieu Amalric in a lovely performance), as his friends called him, was 43 when he was left with "locked-in syndrome," unable to communicate except by blinking his left eye. He was the successful editor of French Elle, a hip father of three with at least one mistress (how French), and a sense of humor that survived the stroke.

When a former colleague visits him at his seaside rehab facility and says everyone in Paris is gossiping that "Jean-Do is a vegetable," Jean-Do wonders -- aloud to us -- "What? A carrot? A pickle?" Against all odds, he dictates an account of his post-stroke life using a code entailing the alphabet and a series of eye blinks.

But the movie, expertly expanded from Bauby's book by screenwriter Ronald Harwood, isn't about that triumph. This is no disease-of-the-week film -- it's about the beauty of life. He may be radically compromised and limited to observation, but Jean-Do wants to live. He uses his imagination to take flight; sharing sumptuous meals with women he loves, dancing with an empress and watching the famed ballet dancer Nijinsky leap down the rehab center's hallway. It is in these almost surreal scenes that Schnabel, best known as a painter, most clearly reveals his artistry.

There isn't a more distilled, eloquent illustration of heartbreak than the final scene between Almaric and Max von Sydow, who plays Papinou, Jean-Do's father. Papinou, in his 90s and too fragile to leave his apartment, speaks to Jean-Do on the phone through an interpreter. He is flummoxed by how hard communication is. "I miss you," the old man sobs to the son who can't answer him, except in code, and in von Sydow's anguished cry, the monumental injustice of it all comes crashing down on us.