L'Odyssée (2016)
Directed by Jérôme Salle

Film Review

It has been almost twenty years since Jacques-Yves Cousteau died and already his memory is beginning to fade.  The charismatic white-haired man in the red woolly hat, whose television programmes introduced millions to the undersea world long before the BBC nature documentarists got there, was a television icon in the early 1970s, as well as being an important pioneer of marine conservation.  It was to preserve Cousteau's memory that director Jérôme Salle embarked on his biggest adventure yet, a big budget biopic charting the extraordinary career of this remarkable individual after he quit the French navy at the end of the 1940s.

Salle had by this time already made an impact as a director of gutsy action thrillers such as Anthony Zimmer (2005) and Largo Winch (2008), but despite his obvious admiration for Cousteau he was probably the wrong person to direct this film.  Instead of a rigorous biopic that probes the man as much as his passion for the sea what Salle turns in is a rather ponderous family drama, which is more trashy soap opera than biographical portrait.  Salle comes into his own with the film's extraordinary underwater set-pieces, which have enough of a visual impact to take your breath away, but when he turns the camera on Cousteau and tries to get a grip on his complex and often contradictory nature he fails to dip so much as a tentative toe beneath the surface.  With a substantial budget and an impressive big name cast, L'Odyssée promises much but delivers barely a fraction of what Cousteau's admirers have been waiting for.  It's a step up from Wes Anderson's caricature of the man in his American comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), but not much.

Thanks to an impressive make-up job, Lambert Wilson just manages to acquire a passing resemblance to Cousteau and he imitates his mannerisms without making his performance an obvious caricature.  There is a tantalising hint of an incredibly complex individual just under the surface of Wilson's engaging portrayal, but thanks to a hopelessly banal screenplay this is one fascinating ocean the film doesn't feel inclined to visit.  The other characters are even more sketchily drawn, so that actors as capable as Audrey Tautou and Pierre Niney fail to do much with their portrayals of Cousteau's wife and son respectively.  Some other characters come off even worse and look like the worst kind of stereotype.

Most of this sluggish and uneven film is preoccupied with Cousteau's ruthless business deals and his problematic relationship with his son Philippe, who was apparently concerned with environmental issues years before Cousteau Senior was (hence their many fallings out). There is an awful lot of additional detail which is too hastily glossed over to be of any interest.  By trying to cover so much territory, the film ends up delivering the thinnest and most insubstantial of portraits of a man who is as profound and changeable as the oceans he explored.  Still, whilst massively disappointing as a biopic, the film is at least partly redeemed by its stunning underwater sequences, which go some way to recreating the sense of wonder that television audiences felt back in the 1970s whilst watching Cousteau's underwater adventures for the first time.  L'Odyssée's main value is as a nostalgia piece.  It recognises the part that Cousteau played in popularising underwater nature documentaries and getting marine preservation off the ground, but about the man himself it is frustratingly vague.

Film Synopsis

After retiring from the French navy in the late 1940s, Commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau lives an idyllic life with his wife Simone and their two sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe, in a beautiful house overlooking the Mediterranean.  Cousteau's lifelong fascination with the sea leads him to invent a self-contained diving suit which allows him to examine more closely the magical world beneath the waves.  From a business magnate he obtains a former minesweeper and proceeds to adapt this into a vessel that will allow him to realise his dream.  With a ship christened the Calypso, Commander Cousteau can begin his exploration of the world's seas and bring its marvels into the living rooms of millions who share his wonderment for sea-life.  But as fame and success come his way, Cousteau's family life becomes increasingly riven with conflict and bitterness...