Movie Swap. Wow I need a better title than that. But since I can't think of anything better right now, that's what I'm going to call it. So here's the story: I go to a karate class and there I annoy people with movie quotes and talking about movies non-stop. Well, it turns out that one of my friends is also a giant movie buff and we got talking about the worst movies we have. Curiosity got the better of both of us so we decided to do a little swap. He watches what I felt was the worst movie in my collection and he would lend me one of his. He told me that his wife really hated it but it was one that he personally liked... but it's not a good movie.
He chose The Big Blue.
I don't think I've ever seen a more self-indulgent movie in my life. Never has a movie taken so long to get to the point. And I'm not sure there even was a point. It's full of pointless melodrama and I'd say a criminally insane level of competition and obsessiveness.
The movie is about a famous deep sea diver named Jacques Mayol. He was a relatively famous free-diver who set a world record for diving 400 feet without the use of any kind of breathing apparatus. So yes the movie does have some diving in it. Jacques (Jean-Marc Barr) and his best friend/rival Enzo (Jean Reno) are set to compete in an international diving contest.
Before the competition started Jacque met a lovely woman from the USA, Johanna (Rosanna Arquette). She falls in love with him immediately and in a drastically bad exercise in insanity, she commits fraud against her employers in order to scam a trip to Cicily so she can meet up with Jacques and watch him dive.
The movie plays out the way you'd expect. Jacques sets a world record and beats Enzo. Jacques and Johanna fall in love. They break up. They get back together. Enzo dies. Jacques takes it hard. It's your standard story. Told poorly.
The biggest complaint I have about this movie is that it's just WAY too long. I watched the director's cut and it was 3 hours long! And so much of that was watching dolphins swim around. When I call this movie self-indulgent I mean it. We see so much padding of dolphin swimming it gets annoying. And the sex scenes between Johanna and Jacques stretch out for several minutes too long as well. And then there's the diving scenes. If you ever wanted to know every little thing these free divers do, they show you. In great detail. Right down to how they breathe before diving.
This is a personal story about Jacques. And I hated him. I felt like he was arrogant, self-involved, anti-social, and mentally disturbed. Jacques is obsessed with dolphins. So much so that after what I assume is his first time having sex with a woman (he had this look in his eyes that said, "wow this is what sex feels like. Who knew?") he hears a bunch of dolphins playing in the ocean so he goes to play with them all night. There's also a scene where he asks Enzo and Johanna to help him steal a dolphin and release it in the ocean. Even at the end of the movie he leaves a pregnant Johanna to go back down into the water and swim with a dolphin even though he has the bends. The term "coocoo for cocoa puffs" comes to mind.
This was a fictionalized story involving these characters. The real Jacques Mayol didn't grow up with Enzo and Enzo was a few years older than Jacques. They didn't meet until much later in life. He was a contributing writer in the screenplay of The Big Blue. He was also a philosopher. He believed that humans had an aquatic origin. He explains much of it in his book, The Dolphin Within Man. I don't care to read it, but feel free to do so. Jacques Mayol committed suicide in 2001.
If you really have 3 hours to kill, I'd recommend 2001: A Space Odyssey or Heat before ever trying this one out. The Big Blue is just too dull. It's just no fun at all.
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