Nothing in director Julian Schnabel's career so far has anticipated the sweetness, sadness, maturity and restraint of this lovely movie. It is a very moving and deeply satisfying version of the bestselling 1997 memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the 43-year-old Parisian fashion magazine editor who, at the very height of wealth, health and success was paralysed by a stroke and suffered from "locked-in syndrome". He could hear and see perfectly, but could not move or speak. The thing he could do was blink his left eyelid and, with ferocious effort, learned to blink in a special alphabet-code and by this means "dictate" his extraordinary memoir. Bauby was submerged in a diving bell of physical immobility: that precious, fluttering eyelid was a butterfly of freedom and hope.

Armed with Ronald Harwood's robust screenplay, Schnabel has applied his visual sense to create a distinctive look and feel for his movie, part magic lantern, part hallucinatory fuzz, a watery depth from which float up memories and reveries, fantastical constructions and visions. It is only in the past and in fantasy that Bauby can escape his condition. These images drift past his field of vision, and sequences of almost narcotic melancholy or indeterminacy will suddenly snap shut as we are forced back into clinical reality. Schnabel moves with seamless assurance from Bauby's agonised, bedridden point-of-view to the third-person camera positions showing us the ruined invalid, images whose objectivity is conditioned by Bauby's fiercely unsentimental sense of self.

He is played by Mathieu Amalric: an actor with one of the most beguiling screen faces: cherubic, ironic, sensual. When a flashback shows him in his pomp, breezing into a fashion shoot, dishevelled and unshaven as only a very celebrated or handsome man can afford to be, he radiates well-being.
Amalric is a tremendous screen actor; it may be that his forthcoming elevation to Bond villain in the new 007 film will bring him to a wider audience; I hope it does not caricature his style. This is a wonderful performance. As for Schnabel, it is an exhilarating breakthrough, and for screenwriter Ronald Harwood the movie is another triumph of responsive, creative intelligence.