BY MSNBC

Astonishingly beautiful and self-consciously so, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” about the stroke that paralyzed French Elle Editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, never ceases to remind you that it is a work of art.

The imagery from painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel (“Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls”) is so arresting, and yet so artificial, it calls to mind the kind of advertising spread you’d see in the late Bauby’s fashion magazine. But you do have to give him and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) credit for interpreting on screen a subject matter and a state of mind that wouldn’t seem inherently visual.

Bauby (the resourceful Mathieu Amalric), or “Jean-Do” as he was known among his jet-setting friends, found himself in a hospital one day at age 43, having awakened from a coma in a condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” His brain functioned quickly (and Amalric provides an interior monologue that’s by turns sarcastic, frustrated, vulnerable and hopeful), he just couldn’t move or speak. His only means of communication was his left eye, which he used to blink out his thoughts one painstaking letter at a time and eventually compose an entire book.

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