Becoming Cousteau (8/10)

by Tony Medley

93 minutes.

PG-13

Jacques Cousteau was a world famous French undersea explorer, researcher, photographer, and documentary host who invented diving and scuba devices, including the Aqua-Lung. Directed by Liz Garbus and narrated by Vincent Cassel, this film follows him from his start in the ocean in the 1930s and follows him to his death in 1997.

Born in 1910, he started spear fishing around 1936 with Philippe Tailiez and Frédéric Dumas. They continued together for decades.

He wanted to be able to dive without being tethered to an air pipe. Through his wife’s father he met an engineer, Émile Gagnan, who developed a regulator intended to power automobiles. He borrowed one and mounted it on the air bottles and started testing it in the Marne. He could go down to 30 feet without any increase in water pressure. Thus, was borne the aqualung.

After the war the three of them created the Underwater Research Group in Toulon for the National Navy. In 1947 his small group experimented on diving below 50 meters. The documentary includes the film of Cousteau’s First Mate Farques dying on the first dive below 100 meters.

In 1951 he purchased a WWII minesweeper and converted it into Calypso, which he kept for the rest of his life. The music in the film is OK, but it would have been a lot better if it had included John Denver’s wonder homage to Cousteau, “Calypso.”

Cousteau says, “I become furious when they label my films documentary. That means a lecture by a guy who knows more than you. Our films are not documentaries. They are true adventure films.” Louis Malle says, “He is a filmmaker…Many directors I know could envy his sense of cinema.’

One weakness of the film is that it doesn’t deal with his relationship with Francine Triplet. He married his wife, Siimone in 1937 and she was his partner and was always on the Calypso trips. She seems a dedicated woman and mother. She died in 1987, but Jacques began an affair with Triplet during her life, having two children with her in 1980 and 1982. They married six months after Simone’s death. The film doesn’t mention if his relationship with Francine was with his wife’s knowledge and permission or done behind her back, which would make him unfaithful and discredit Jacques, at least in my opinion. If you are going to make a truthful documentary, you should deal with the good and the bad.

Garbus had access to 550 hours of archival footage with nearly 100 hours of rarely seen footage from before he became one of the most important environmental figures of the 20th century.