Max von Sydow and Mathieu Amalric in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

Though I’ve owned a copy of it for years, I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch Johnny Got His Gun, the 1971 film directed by the once-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. It’s an anti-war tale about a young man who enlists in the army during World War I for all the wrong reasons, and ends up an armless, legless, faceless and speechless hulk in a hospital bed, unable to communicate enough to let his tenders know that he is still conscious. (You may have seen snippets of it in the Metallica video “One.”) It sounds depressing as hell, especially because it touches on a real fear we’ve probably all thought about: How would it be to spend the rest of your life in an outwardly vegetative state, conscious on the inside but presumed brain dead and kept alive, perhaps indefinitely, by machines? Would you want to die, would you go insane, or would the mind adapt?

What happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby wasn’t quite that bad, but close enough. At the age of 43, he was the editor of the fashion magazine Elle, and as much of a bon vivant as you would expect of a man in that position. But an unexpected stroke turned him from a healthy, frolicking Frenchman into a paralytic with control over only one muscle, his left eyelid.

By blinking that eyelid in response to an assistant pointing at a list of letters, Bauby wrote and published a memoir, which is the basis of this film. It was directed by the painter Julian Schnabel, who has an affinity for artists working under difficult circumstances—he also made Basquiat and Before Night Falls.

The premise of Bauby’s memoir is that life rests in the mind, which allows him to be free, a “butterfly” floating above the “diving bell” that is his immobile body. He is able to retrieve and relive his experiences, and to some degree to maintain relationships with the people in his life (all of whom, aside from his aged father and some professional associates, are played by an array of beautiful French actresses. So much for motivation.)

Schnabel’s film opens with Bauby in the hospital, not quite aware of how dire his situation is, and for the early sections of the film we see the world from his perspective, what he can see from one eye as he goes in and out of consciousness. These scenes, which are evocative but frustrating, vary with Bauby’s memories as he recalls his life and contemplates his future.

As a reviewer for the Village Voice noted, if directing awards were given on the basis of quantity, Schnabel would be a lock for the Oscars. In attempting to depict an entirely internal consciousness, he works triple time weaving from thought to thought, between memory and imagination.

It’s a tour de force, but one I found oddly unmoving. Perhaps I’m too accustomed to films of this genre about people overcoming severe physical adversity, that openly tug at your heartstrings. You might be inclined to compare it to My Left Foot, with Daniel Day Lewis’s astonishing performance as the Irish artist Christy Brown, who was so crippled by cerebral palsy that he could control only the titular appendage. But that story gave Day Lewis a wholly physical character to play. As Bauby, the French actor Mathieu Amalric gets to act in the physical sense only in flashbacks. The consciousness we’re most aware of is that of the filmmaker, eager to impress us with his art.