Becom­ing Cousteau

Spell­bound by the splen­dour, silence and har­mo­ny of the sea, Jacques ​“Jeke” Cousteau, with his char­ac­ter­is­tic red knit­ted cap and deeply root­ed nomadic instincts, was only tru­ly hap­py when under­wa­ter. Liz Gar­bus’ doc­u­men­tary attempts a straight­for­ward dive into the depths of the man’s own Odyssey: from being the co-inven­tor of the first com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful scu­ba equip­ment, to pop­u­lar­is­ing film­ing tech­nolo­gies that brought the under­wa­ter imag­i­na­tion to the surface.

In short, Cousteau paved the way for future gen­er­a­tions of divers, envi­ron­men­tal­ists and under­wa­ter film­mak­ers. Although fad­ed into rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty, his films linger on, cap­tur­ing the glo­ri­ous seascapes and pow­ered by grip­ping sto­ry­telling. He used to say: ​“My films are not doc­u­men­taries. They are true adven­ture films.”

Eschew­ing the con­ven­tion­al talk­ing heads for­mat, Gar­bus’ film is an inti­mate and sin­cere bil­dungsro­man in the way it skil­ful­ly draws on voiceovers from his fam­i­ly, friends and crew mem­bers, as well as old­er inter­views and Cousteau’s jour­nal entries. We feel the pres­ence of a ​“Jeke” who was larg­er than life, a leg­endary pio­neer, a devot­ed envi­ron­men­tal­ist, an inno­v­a­tive film­mak­er and a child­hood hero to many (includ­ing Wes Ander­son). His gen­tle nature radi­ates from the beau­ti­ful­ly restored archival footage which includes crisp, nev­er-before- seen prints and home movies from The Cousteau Society.

It’s with mixed feel­ings of excite­ment and fear that Cap­tain Cousteau and his crew of ​“mal­ad­just­ed” ocea­nauts board the Calyp­so where they find a lib­er­a­tion that post-war life on land had denied them. They strip away every­thing that’s use­less to them, just like the mytho­log­i­cal Arg­onauts would replace the parts of their boat, Argo, over time.

Jacques’ wife Simone, affec­tion­ate­ly nick­named La Bergère (‘The Shep­herdess’), was the matri­arch of the Calypso’s all-male crew, while she also shared the same curi­ous thirst for dis­cov­ery and adven­ture. Before pass­ing, Simone wrote: ​“Calyp­so has giv­en me every­thing. No man in the world would ever offer me what this ves­sel has”. It wasn’t blood, but rather salt­wa­ter that flowed in this couple’s veins.

In his time, Cousteau aspired to go fur­ther and deep­er before real­is­ing that the ocean was in dis­tress and rapid­ly chang­ing before his very eyes. It’s been decades since Cousteau warned about the envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters that we’re expe­ri­enc­ing today, yet his calls for aquat­ic con­ser­va­tion came years after he was con­tract­ed to under­take a geo­log­i­cal sur­vey of the seabed in the Per­sian Gulf, receiv­ing invest­ments by help­ing com­pa­nies drill for oil.

Gar­bus nev­er tries to con­ceal Cousteau’s flaws. For her, in order to under­stand where we are now, we first need to under­stand where we came from, and Cousteau rep­re­sents that touchpoint.