The Big Blue is a 1988 film by Luc Besson and was released in some countries under Le Grand Bleu. The story of the friendship and sporting rivalry between two leading contemporary champion free divers in the 20th century, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, is heavily fictionalized and dramatized.
The film was a box-office success in France, one of the most commercially successful films (although an American version never made it to a cinema near you). After Mayol died in 2001, a French president named Jacques Chirac described the film as an enduring symbol for the “Big Blue” generation.
The film adaptation of the story was very extensive. Maiorca retired from diving to politics in the 1980s, and Mayol lived from 1927 to 2001 in real life. Both set no-limits category deep diving records below 100 meters, and Mayol was involved in scientific research into human aquatic potential, but neither reached 400 feet (122 meters) as depicted in the film, and they were not direct competitors. Mayol’s search for love, family, “wholeness,” the meaning of life and death, and the conflict and tension between his yearning for the deep and his relationship with his girlfriend were written by Mayol himself.
Plot
In the 1960s, two children, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Molinari, were raised on the Greek island of Amorgos. Jacques refused to collect the coin that Enzo was trying to collect on the sea floor. Jacques’ father is a scuba diver who harvests shellfish using a pump-supplied air hose and helmet. He drowned when his breathing apparatus and the rope got caught in the rocks on the reef and weighed down by the water. As he is killed, Jacques and Enzo can’t help but watch in horror.
By the 1980s, both were well-known freedivers, swimmers who could remain underwater for long periods. There is a trapped diver in Sicily, and Enzo is saving him. He is a world champion freediver with a strong personality and wants to convince Jacques to return to no-limits freediving to prove that he is still the there is a friendly sports rivalry between the two.
Jacques works extensively with scientific research as a human research subject and with dolphins and is temporarily participating in research into human physiology in the iced-over lakes of the Peruvian Andes, where his remarkable and dolphin-like bodily responses to cold water were The insurance broker is introduced to Jacques when she visits the station for work. She fell in love with him but didn’t tell anyone. When she learns Jacques will be at the World Diving Championships in Taormina, Sicily, she invents an insurance problem that requires her to be there to meet him again. She and Jacques fall in love together. None of them realize the extent of Jacques’ attraction to the depths. Enzo gives Jacques a crystal dolphin as a gift and a tape measure to show the small difference between his and Jacques’ records after Jacques beats him by one meter. After discovering her deception, she leaves New York to live with Jacques and is fired from her job in New York. She hears a story that if you love the deep sea, you will be able to see a mermaid at the depths of the sea and lead a diver to an enchanted place.
The Big Blue has a 7.5 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database. If you like action thrillers, you need to watch this film.
