L’Odysée

Jérôme Salle (2016)

‘The photography is breathtaking’ is the mantra of fans of natural world documentaries.  It’s always true but it’s rarely enough.  If it were enough, there’d be no need for anthropomorphic words and music to liven things up.  David Attenborough is obviously, as well as a national treasure, very brainy but I’ve always felt his jaunty commentaries provide essentially the same service as the voiceovers in the much-derided Disney nature films of yesteryear.  As a child, I quite enjoyed those – more, anyway, than I enjoyed The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau documentaries that the BBC showed in the late sixties and early seventies.  Maybe these were diminished on a black-and-white set but there was something too about Cousteau that I didn’t like:  he seemed autocratic and humourless.  Matias Boucard’s underwater photography in Jérôme Salle’s Cousteau biopic The Odyssey is often remarkable though, oddly enough, it’s an overground shot – of the tiny figures of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his son Philippe standing in a vast Antarctic icescape – that merits the word breathtaking.  The visuals, in this case, are definitely not enough, even though the wonders of nature include, in addition to marine flora and fauna, very good-looking lead actors (Lambert Wilson, Audrey Tautou, Pierre Niney).  The sounds of the ocean and of Alexandre Desplat’s agreeable score aren’t enough either.  The Odyssey achieves the unusual feat of being submarine, shallow and pedestrian.

Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), a wry take on Cousteau’s biography and myth, had as a central plot element the relationship between Steve Zissou and a young man claiming to be his son.  Jérôme Salle supplies the straight story of Cousteau’s relationships with his two boys.  For the most part, this reflects badly on Cousteau père and perhaps Salle feels he’s created a warts-and-all portrait but the narrative texture is too primitive to make it convincing as such.  For example, Cousteau, thanks largely to pressure from Philippe, becomes a belated convert to the environmentalist cause (earlier on, to show how far he has to travel in this direction, Salle shows a load of rubbish being tipped from Cousteau’s boat Calypso into the sea).  The conversion reconciles father and son.  A main cause of the bad blood between them has been Philippe’s disgusted belief that his father would do anything for fame and fortune.  You’re therefore bound to wonder if saving the planet appealed to Cousteau at least partly as a new means of getting attention and funding.  That wouldn’t, of course, invalidate his work as an eco-warrior but it would be consistent with the man the film has presented up to this point.  It would also make for complexity – Cousteau applying his self-centred drive to an altruistic project (more altruistic than his earlier passion for human colonisation of the undersea world).   Instead, Jérôme Salle and Laurent Turner, with whom Salle co-wrote The Odyssey, suddenly present Cousteau as a wholly reformed character, in readiness for the reverent on-screen legends at the end that pay tribute to his pioneering achievements in marine conservation etc.

It’s as well that the protagonist’s line of work is visually distinctive because this film, as a sequence of events, is mostly biopic boilerplate.  Cousteau first enters the limelight at the premiere of one of his early films.  After the screening, his colleague Philippe Tailliez (Laurent Lucas), who had also worked with Cousteau on the development of the ‘aqua-lung’, is meant to give a speech.  Tailliez’s terrible stammer strikes him dumb and Cousteau steps in to rescue the situation and impress the large audience.  But why would Tailliez – in view of his impediment and since he doesn’t come across as a natural attention-seeker – be lined up for the speech in the first place?  Cousteau’s appetite for celebrity then makes him a distant father and a negligent husband – an adulterous one too, thanks to his appetite for women.  Philippe marries an American girl (Chloé Hirschman) and goes to live in the US, estranged from his parents:  it’s not clear why he and his father meet in an American diner other than to fulfil the generic requirement of a home-truths-telling showdown.  The death of Philippe, just when he and dad are starting to get on well, is a similarly obligatory cruel stroke of fate.  While Cousteau himself is abruptly transformed, other characters never change:  in the case of both Philippe and his elder brother Jean-Michel, the child is decidedly father to the man.  The film opens with the plane accident that kills Philippe – the craft he’s piloting crashes into the sea.  In the early parts of the flashback that follows (and which lasts for most of the film), the child Philippe (Ulysse Stein) is precociously intrepid and strong-willed – the polar opposite of cautious, uninteresting Jean-Michel (Rafaël de Ferran).  That’s how they stay.

Casting Lambert Wilson as Cousteau makes the eleventh-hour conversion easier to accept, if only because this good actor hasn’t been very persuasive as a selfish bastard.  Wilson, with his weather-beaten face and aquiline profile, cuts an imposing figure but egomania doesn’t come easily to him – his Cousteau always seems a nice chap.  Pierre Niney holds the camera too but the role of Philippe is too thin to do much with and Niney does petulance better than righteous anger.  Benjamin Lavernhe has even less to work with as the well-meaning, risk-averse Jean-Michel.  The characterisation of Americans – from Philippe’s wife to the film and TV moneymen Cousteau does business with – is pathetically crude.  It’s a surprise of The Odyssey that Cousteau’s wife Simone (Audrey Tautou), whom her husband calls Loubi, becomes the most involving character.  You’d never predict this from the early stages, when she’s nothing more than a smiling, utterly supportive wife.  From the moment she discovers her husband’s been unfaithful, her face never cracks, she hits the bottle and starts playing solitaire – all the things you’d expect someone in her circumstances to do in a movie.   Things get more interesting when Cousteau is in deep financial trouble and Loubi, the sale of whose jewellery helped him to buy Calypso in the first place, says she doesn’t want him to sell the craft – that she wants to stay on it.  This is the film’s best dramatic moment:  not only has the boat become Loubi’s natural habitat; since she’s the only woman on board, it’s also the one place where she can be sure Cousteau isn’t playing away from home.  Audrey Tautou is excellent in suggesting a woman disappointed yet relieved by the half-a-loaf life into which she’s sunk.  In the end, I found this one of her most taking performances.  She turned forty last year:  she looks great but, for as long as her function in Jérôme Salle’s film seems purely decorative, you can’t help thinking of another screen Audrey whose gamine charm made her a star but whose best work was behind her by the time she was the age that Tautou is now.  The latter shows in The Odyssey her potential to take on more substantial roles.  I hope she gets the chance to do so.

20 August 2017