the darkerside to rants

… I just spent three hours with my favourite movie: “Le Grande Bleu” and every-time I see it…. I am melancholy happy (yes yes, oxymoron) can’t help it.

I am not really certain what draws me back to the movie over and over again but by now I must have seen it more than a hundred times, and I am still not ready to “let it go” so to speak.

The film originally came out in 1988 and I think something struck me there… I was 14 at that time, it was two years after Top Gun had come in and everybody I knew wanted to become a fighter pilot, I remember spending a lot of time in Flight Simulators. But when I saw “Le Grande Bleu” for the first time it didn’t really let me go, not to this day, 18 years later.

I guess if I am honest, the film probably showed already who I had become. I can identify with Jacques Mayol, what drives him. For Enzo it is the competition, to “be the best” (which ultimately kills him) but for Jacques it is life. He needs to do it, it is part of him, it is him. And if he has to chose between love on land or being at sea, he choses the sea because he knows he never could be on land and be happy.

- Tell me a Story.
- A Story? — Do you know how it is — Do you know what you’re supposed to do to meet a mermaid? — You go down to the bottom of the sea… where the water isn’t even blue anymore … where the sky is only a memory… and you float there in the silence. And you stay there … and you decide that you’ll die for them. Only then do they start coming out. They come and they greet you and they judge the love you have for them. If it is sincere… if it is pure… they’ll be with you… and take you away forever.

In the end he makes his choice, he is going to find the mermaids, and he is giving up everything else he has. A selfish act maybe, but then, love is selfish, isn’t it? We proclaim to give it freely, but we want it in return. And so he goes, he follows his heart, leaving behind another one.

Le Grande Bleu is a love story, not Hollywood, it is a crossover almost between a Film-Noir and a Love story. It is, I guess one could say, bittersweet as life itself. It is something that hasn’t really let me go…. And in a way, being in Vancouver now, close to the sea and the mountains I can feel it a bit more, just like Jacques may have felt it.

It has a sad ending and a happy ending, it is all. Like life. And maybe this is why the movie doesn’t let me go…… If you haven’t seen it. Watch it.