An account of Jacques Cousteau’s life – co-produced by his children – that is not uncritical, but could have yielded more insights into the family
For an “official” documentary – sanctioned by the Cousteau Society and co-produced by his children Diane and Pierre-Yves Cousteau – this account of Jacques Cousteau’s life and mermaid’s purse of achievements is not completely uncritical. Not only does it show how the ocean explorer, seen bludgeoning sharks and dynamiting coral reefs in his 1956 classic The Silent World, graduated to become an indefatigable conservationist before his death in 1997; it also broaches the emotional price paid by the Cousteau family for his constant horizon-chasing, something his little filmed first wife Simone seems to have been even more ruthless about: “No man in the world could offer me what this vessel has.”
You’re probably familiar with the trademarks – the good ship Calypso’s crew of “dropouts”, the red beanies, the wanderlust – as rhapsodised by Cousteau in his films and TV specials, and lifted by Wes Anderson for 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Even so, the course Cousteau charted through 20th-century exploration, exploitation and, belatedly, environmentalism is still quite stunning: pioneering western freediver, the inventor of the aqualung in Toulon, discoverer of the
Oil reserves that enriched Abu Dhabi, swashbuckling film-maker who won the Palme d’Or, and by the mid-1980s a de facto elder statesman whom governments could not afford to ignore on the emerging topic of climate change.