🎬 #199 Deep Friendship.
Just one recommendation to kick off this year. It’s a film I’ve wanted to see for a long time and eventually made the time for it over Christmas. It’s Luc Besson before he made Léon and apparently only the director’s cut is available or is most readily available on streamers. Coming in at almost 3 hours it’s a wild, tonal swirl of competition and friendship, love and brotherhood.
Please enjoy
Bry
FILM: The Big Blue
1988 Dir Luc Besson
2 hrs 48 mins
This film is part love story, life-long male bromance - slapstick humour, zany cartoon-like characters and questionable but very loving relationships with Dolphins. It’s a wild time to spend with larger than life characters who are utterly dedicated to the world they inhabit - that of free divers, who live on the edge between life and death, separated by the salty meniscus of the ocean. But the film explores the inverse of what you might imagine - the idea that in pursuit of deeper and deeper depths, they become more and more alive. They fall in love with cold darkness - they become themselves down there. At those depths, the pressures of the realities above the surface disappear, all responsibilities vanish and you can truly be at peace.
I love films where you can tell there is an operator behind the camera, there is a tactility to the filmmaking. This film is full of that - imperfect helicopter shots, the camera moving in the gimbal, sweeping over the ocean. It’s slightly messy, but it’s beautiful. The costume design, the late 80’s period and the sun shimmering off blue white sea gives this film that feeling of first holiday’s abroad. It made me get nostalgic for day-go colours that Agassi might have worn. It made me remember the feeling you got [if you’re a certain age] or seeing brightly coloured plastic Swatch watches in airport shops - before being told no by your parents. Looking back at these plastic gems in glass cases as you walked to your gate to catch your flight. The feel of heat between plane and terminal building as you stepped into a new foreign climate.
This is a film about the pursuit of something beyond the ordinary. A literal submergence of yourself, completely, in something you’re in love with. Going beyond what others think is reasonable to feel something you can’t even explain to them. And the realisation that only one other person can understand it, and it’s your closest friend and fiercest competitor.