A world of moral Turbulence

Published on September 20, 2007

In ex-painter Julian Schnabel's new film, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", Jean-Dominique Bauby is a successful publisher of a woman's magazine and, as a lady's man, he enjoys the benefits. Then he has a massive stroke and suffers from "locked-in syndrome" - although alert, all he can do is move his one good eyelid.

Many of the films at the Toronto Film Festival this year were about characters suffering through changing moral landscapes. "Diving Bell" has a couple of such dilemmas: We are surprised when Bauby, who knows he has left the garden of sensual delights, still chooses a mistress who now ignores him over the kind mother of his children, his still-attentive wife.

Mostly, though, his adjustment to his new mental landscape is so skilfully delineated that we are gripped in a strange adventure, more phenomenology than moral tale.

Two of the other films shown this year are set in the wide open Central Asian steppe, but two others take place in stodgy old England, and the subject of a fifth - abortion - is a lesson in ethics. Made in Romania, this film is highly circumscribed in place and time (and budget) but absolutely gripping.

In both Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and Sergei Bodrov's "Mongol", monarchs require sincerity in their personal lives, but sacrifice simple happiness to the impersonal, almost cruel ways of power.

On his first official journey, Temujin - the future Genghis Khan, but here still a boy - loses his father but gains a wife, albeit from a weak tribe. Man and wife form a strong bond of loyalty: She teases him that, although he ritually chose her, the reality was that she chose him.

Because of his father's death, shifting tribal alliances and brutal politics, Temujin has to constantly flee or else fight for his life. His wife, meanwhile, is abducted, raped and then must sleep with a caravan trader out of sheer expediency. His children, whom he does his best to love, might not even be his.

On the surface, the dilemma facing Queen Elizabeth I is the opposite: chastity. Sir Walter Raleigh names his American colony "Virginia" in honour of the untouched state of his queen. But is Elizabeth untouched? Kapur's previous instalment, the 1999 film "Elizabeth", hints that she is not. There, her gender is the main obstacle to the throne as the daughter of Henry VIII, but here in the sequel her main rival is also styled as "queen" and is distinguished from Elizabeth largely by her Catholicism - there is only oblique reference to the problem of Elizabeth's gender.

Although she has a woman's needs, she must endure her disappointment with Sir Walter, who falls instead for her lady-in-waiting. She is largely stoical but, for just a moment, there is a white-hot flash of anger.

She sublimates her urges into serious projects. With Sir Walter's help, she burns the Spanish Armada and thus imprints her name on history.

The other corresponding pair of films also has a romantic dimension - England and the Steppes are again the two backdrops - but these films are set closer to the present era.

In "Atonement", an overly imaginative young girl, inexperienced in the dark ways of sexuality, mistakenly condemns her sister's lover to jail and her sister to a scandal. But now they are dead, so how does she apologise? Imagined forgiveness becomes the goal.

As in any English story, class undercurrents are never far below the surface.

The script of "Ulzhan" is by one of the best writers for cinema, Jean-Claude Carriere, whose work includes many of the classic Bunuel films.

Charles is a Frenchman who wanders the steppes, not caring if he has a passport or money, claiming he's after buried gold. The lovely Ulzhan (Ayanat Ksenbai) follows Charles, trying to work out what drives him - perhaps the death of a loved one? At times he loses his physical bearings, but, thanks to Ulzhan and other kind people, Charles slowly gains his moral ones.

Although "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" by new director Cristian Mungiu is about an abortion, it is told from the point of view of the pregnant girl's friend. Need she have sex with a creep and cheat on her fiance to help her friend out of trouble?

This small film achieves more suspense than a bank-heist movie. The heroine is taken on a vertiginous ride, her moral compass whirling around. The friend who actually has the abortion seems a bimbo by contrast, but she displays remarkable backbone.

So does Bauby in "Diving Bell". He is still an enterprising man, so he embarks into the world of words, writing a strange autobiography, at once imprisoned and liberating.

Schnabel, himself a strong-willed, perverse ladies' man understands and, I think, identifies with this character. With the same doggedness with which he waits for his absent mistress, Bauby perseveres with his diary, blinking it out in an odd kind of Morse code.

In these films as well as others shown at Toronto - like "Into the Wild" and "The Counterfeiters" - the essence of the most compelling characters is their creative response to changing circumstances, tentative at first, but ultimately strong and morally guided.

Nick Palevsky

 Special to The Nation