“I am miserable out of the water," Jacques Cousteau explains in the the opening moments of Becoming Cousteau, filmmaker Liz Garbus’ lovely, heartfelt paean to a kinder, gentler, more idealistic time.
“It’s as though you’ve been introduced to heaven,” Cousteau continues, in his lilting, lives-lived accent, “and forced back to Earth.”
First, prologue. The life aquatic came to Cousteau naturally and early, and this film is made in a cheerful, naturalistic style in keeping with its affection for natural history and the wonders of the sea.
There’s no artifice or empty bombast here. The film is made in English, with occasional French and English subtitles, but in look, tone, sentiment and feel, it’s very, very French. There are moments when Becoming Cousteau sings — literally. The choice of music is inspired throughout, and puts to shame the “wall-to-wall" computer-generated sound of so many cheaply made, quickie TV docuseries.
Cousteau himself speaks very quickly, like a French Martin Scorsese, as though he can barely get the words out in time before they disappear. You get the feeling his words are trying to catch up with his brain, and failing.
In 1956, long after Cousteau had invented and then refined his scuba technique, he made a film of his own, Le Monde du silence — the Silent World — in locations as far flung as the Persian Gulf off Sudan, Yemen, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia, a region of the world riven today by war and geo-global religious conflict, but back then an untouched underwater paradise. Cousteau and his fellow travellers saw themselves as guardians of an underwater cathedral. Cousteau was an early ecologist and one of the first filmmakers to recognize how precious reefs are, and how they need to be protected. This was long before virtue signalling became fashionable.
Cousteau was a pragmatist, too.
Penniless and broke at the time, his research vessel Calypso in dire need of funding, he made a pact that today, with the benefit of hindsight, looks like a pact with the devil: He agreed to search the sea bed for signs of “black gold” on behalf of deep-pocketed Arab emirates in the Arabian Gulf, in exchange for the funding to keep his research and dream of underwater discovery afloat.
Filmmaking came to him honestly. He made his first film at 13 — but films cost money.
“Our films are not documentaries,” he famously said. ”They are true adventures.“
Cousteau was, and remains, a national hero in his native France, and not just among would-be oceanographers and future conservationists. It may be hard to imagine anyone doing this today but Cousteau cut across all social and socioeconomic boundaries. He was inevitably pulled and tugged at by politics and politicians, but he was never himself a political animal.
He was well-spoken and as easy to understand in English as in his native French. He was a man of the world and the voice of a planet, and it’s fair to say he opened the eyes of tens of millions of people from innumerable countries and different regions around the world. He was gatekeeper and holder of secrets of the ocean depths. He hailed from a generation before David Attenborough, but his impact on the global consciousness was equally profound.
“What's it like down there?” a little girl asks Cousteau, at the beginning of this lovely, blue and green film, her voice shaking with awe and childlike curiosity.
“It’s fantastic, “ he says, in thickly accented English. “Imagine.”
Imagine indeed.
— Disney+