Marie-Josée Croze as Henriette in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."
Body Unwilling, a Mind Takes Flight
Julian Schnabel
has made three feature films: “Basquiat,”“Before Night Falls”
and now “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
All are biographical, examining the lives of real people, and in each
case the protagonist struggles with a condition of literal or
metaphorical imprisonment. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mr. Schnabel’s younger
colleague in the New York art scene of the 1980s, is trapped by
addiction and by his outsider status. Reinaldo Arenas, the gay Cuban
poet whose memoir was the basis of “Before Night Falls,” is censored,
harassed and locked up by successive dictatorships.