In the affecting screen adaptation by American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, which premiered to rapturous applause at Cannes last week, French actor Mathieu Amalric portrays the editor as a complex and unsentimental figure. Like the book, the movie explores not only Bauby’s experience as an invalid but also his conscience; he reflects on his cruelty toward those who loved him—his companion, Sylvie (Emmanuelle Seigner), and their three children, whom he left months before his stroke, and his lover Henriette (Marie-José Croze)—and his own arrogance. “He realized he wasn’t alive when he was alive,” Schnabel told NEWSWEEK in Cannes. “With his book, he is telling us how to grab onto the present and make something out of it.”
Fittingly, Schnabel approached the shooting of the film like a painter. He saw a scene in which a physical therapist carries Bauby into a swimming pool as a modern version of the “Pietà.” He cropped images of people—half a face, a disembodied forearm—to give the audience Bauby’s distorted point of view. For a scene in which Bauby’s right eye is sewn shut to avoid infection, Schnabel stretched latex across the camera lens and had it sewn closed.
Originally, the film was planned in English. But Schnabel, who is fluent in French, wanted to film it in its native tongue. His friend Johnny Depp agreed to play Bauby in French, “but then he got busy with that pirate stuff,” Schnabel said. Producer Kathleen Kennedy found Amalric on the set of one of her other projects, Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” “Mathieu had the right sensibility,” Schnabel said. “I don’t think anyone could have done a better job.”
Great acting was the strength of this year’s festival. Javier Bardem shattered audiences with his pure-evil hit man Anton Chigurh in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men,” a rollicking adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a drug deal gone very wrong in west Texas. And when Angelina Jolie, playing French journalist Mariane Pearl in Michael Winterbottom’s chilling “A Mighty Heart,” broke down into primal wails when she heard that her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, had been killed by his captors in Pakistan, some in the audience whispered, “She just won her second Oscar.”
The hottest film at the Riviera resort, however, was Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” a blunt look at how U.S. health-insurance companies have left 50 million Americans without coverage and driven many to bankruptcy, suffering and even premature death. As always, Moore tempers the barrage of bad news with wit. And to the great pleasure of French audiences, he trumpets France’s national health-care system as the world’s best. Moore has come under fire from the Bush administration for accompanying a dozen American patients—including three 9/11 emergency workers—to Cuba, where they were treated compassionately and free of charge. Moore told reporters that he had heard the patients were also under investigation. “I think it’s shameful,” he said. “Go after me. Go after the film. But leave these people alone.” Moviegoers everywhere can rejoice that he didn’t take his own advice.
