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| Courtesy of National Geographic |
Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus has been active on the television and film journalism scene starting in the late 1990s with her Academy Award nominated feature doc The Farm: Angola, USA before being nominated again in 2015 with her Nina Simone doc What Happened, Miss Simone?
A prolific and ever busy
filmmaker with as many as three films released in 2020, soon Garbus embarked on
a five-years-in-the-making project in cooperation with the Cousteau Society and
National Geographic Documentary Films to create one of her most ambitious film
productions yet: Becoming Cousteau or the life and work of
oceanographer, captain, filmmaker and co-developer of the aqua-lung, Jacques-Yves
Cousteau.
A filmmaker himself who went on to produce
the first and only other documentary picture to win the coveted Palme d’Or at
the 1956 Cannes Film Festival for his undersea travelogue The Silent World before
becoming a mainstay on world television on The Undersea World of Jacques
Cousteau, the film chronicles his eventual foray into environmentalism and dives
into his private life rarely discussed or seen behind the cameras.
Utilizing Cousteau’s diaries, narrated
by Vincent Cassell, we’re provided with a mostly complicated portrait of an
equally complex man who initially wanted to become a pilot before a car crash
shifted his interests towards oceanography when he began rehabilitative swimming
to treat his injuries, sparking a lifelong fascination with the deep sea.
Soon designing and employing waterproof
cameras and the development of the Aqualung, Cousteau and his ship the Calypso
embarked on the oceanographer’s now legendary television program. Interspersed with archival footage as well as
newly conducted interviews with surviving members of his entourage, Becoming
Cousteau over the course of the picture ensures we know the mysterious but
celebrated man’s life and work as well as we might know a distant family
relative.
Whereas this could’ve been pure
hagiography which it comes close to being at times, filmmaker Garbus knows well
enough to not exorcise all of the skeletons from Cousteau’s closet, touching on
his absence as a father/husband figure in the household further complicated by
his intense focus on oceanography. What
we’re left with is a picturesque journey through the man’s life, legacy and
above all an impassioned plea to carry on his own warnings about the fragility
of life on our planet.
Cousteau was a
figure I had known about for years, particularly from his documentaries
including one which is glimpsed in this film about salmon traveling
upstream. But by the end of this, I was
ready to dive back into the man’s filmography which more or less completely
paved the way for oceanographic nature documentary programs for decades to
come. Becoming Cousteau doesn’t
answer all the questions people have about Jacques-Yves Cousteau, but it does
bring you a lot closer to the man’s world than ever before!
--Andrew Kotwicki
