The first fifteen minutes of Julian Schnabel’s drama is so utterly excruciating and grueling that the viewer just may be compelled to stop halfway just to regain their composure. Imagine being able to see and hear but not being able to speak, or move, or complain, or laugh, or protest, or decide for yourself. Imagine being forced to do things you don’t want to or having something taken away from you before you’re even able to grasp it? That is the ordeal Jean-Do Bauby experiences when he awakens one day in a hospital to discover that he’s had a massive seizure that put him in a coma for three weeks. Upon awakening and gaining some sense of understanding, he realizes he has Locked-In Syndrome where every part of his body is paralyzed except for one eye. Schnabel’s masterwork is not so much a melodrama about paralyses as it is a story about the writer writing even in spite of every single part of his body working against him. Based on a true story, Jean-Do must learn to talk, swallow, and communicate once again and stay confined in a body that disallows any sense of freedom or affection.

Schnabel brings us into the mind of Jean-Do who can think but only to himself where he begs people to help him and attempts to respond as he does in his mind. Marie-Josée Croze gives a marvelous performance as Henriette, a speech therapist who gives Jean-Do the ability to communicate by blinking whenever a specific word is spoken. This allows for much of Jean-Do’s dialogue with the people in his life who visit and look on in sadness. Upon mastering the form of dialogue, he writes a novel thanks to the help of a dictator named Claude, another woman who helps with his book but plays spectator to much of his misery and barely makes it through the novel in spite of her best attempts at professionalism. Schnabel’s direction and editing are utterly fantastic allowing us to stay in this man’s body and watch as he is unable to perform the most rudimentary tasks like swallowing.

Mathieu Amalric is brilliant as this disabled man who sits with only an eye mobile and tries to express his feelings through blinking but engages in mental monologues as he looks onto the world with a new perspective filled with beautiful women of fantasy, love, compassion and loyalty in spite of his inability to say what he really wants to them. All he can do is hold them in his mind, and he envisions some of the more unusual fantasies where he consumes freely and embraces each woman with a kiss and a touch. Jean-Do constantly has visions involving butterflies, crashing waves, and desolate therapy rooms which convey his anguish and attempts at emotional freedom that are stifled by his immobile body. Thus when he realizes he’s helpless in one world, he retreats into another comprised of memories, fantasies, and a world he’d vowed to create before his inevitable accident. With this Schnabel assures that though Jean-Do is a still body in a huge world we belong to, we’re but foreigners in a world he exists in.

It’s a beautiful film, and director Julian Schnabel brings us an incredible story of a man held prisoner in a state he can not control and chose to express through simple gestures. Thanks to wonderful direction, editing, and cinematography, Schnabel convinces us of this perspective with a stroke of brilliance.

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