I used to like Julian Schnabel so much. I don't have a copy of _Basquiat_,
his other film about a painter. So I scanned through _The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly_, which I do have and was such a powerful piece of work. It
has such a unity of purpose; Mathieu Amalric's point of view dominates,
whether it is the present (in his reduced, paralyzed state) or the past (flashbacks). The camera tricks make sense because we are seeing the world through his one eye. In contrast, I never felt that the gauzy filter in
the bottle half of the screen makes much sense in _At Eternity's Gate_.
Surely van Gogh didn't have eye ailments? We would have known. (Renoir
needed eye treatment in his old age; prior to that, many of his paintings
had truly wild color schemes.)

In any case, I was pleasantly reminded of Marie-Josee Croze's strong presence in the first half of _Diving Bell_. Anne Consigny plays the translator who actually helps Amalric's character write his book, and she is good too, but Croze's neural doctor has laid the foundation to all that.


The much older Croze is marvelous in _2 Nights Till Morning_ too. She plays a career woman stranded at the Vilnius airport by the infamous Iceland volcanic eruption; there she has a romantic encounter with a Finnish celebrity DJ/impressario. She is quite a bit older than he is, and over a day and two nights they reveal to each other intimate life stories. The set-up is reminiscent of _Before Sunrise_, but this film is more interesting because
the two leads have so much more mileage in them. I like Julie Delpy in _Sunrise_
and all, but Croze always brings such complexity and subtlety to her roles. She has won a Cannes and a Romy Schneider, yet is so underrated in the U.S. Her work
here is sensational; too bad her costar Nousiainen isn't in her league.

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