A Film Canon

Like Michael Anderson's version of Around The World In 80 Days, Luc Besson's epic narrative of two professional free-divers (Jean-Marc Barr and Jean Reno) is positioned at a strange junction of spectacle that feels proto-IMAX, or at least cries out for IMAX as the only vehicle that could do its eco-mysticism full justice, or prevent it feeling forced. This is partly because, like Anderson, Besson's globe-trotting panorama of people and places ultimately seems designed to evoke and capture the curvature of the earth - a cinematic snowglobe, with the water cycle as protagonist - and so cries out for a similarly curved, expansive screen for its delivery. It's this fusion of the earth's curvature with a yet-as-unformulated screen that produces Besson's odd combination of natural and technological sublimity, fusing the surface of the ocean with the oil rig that rises out of it, into a distinctively late 80s/early 90s synthetic paganism, perfectly encapsulated in Eric Serra's electronic score. This preoccupation with the ocean as a synthetic surface also means that, unlike the majority of undersea dramas that came out around this time - especially Cameron's The Abyss - there's virtually no interest in underwater topography. Instead, Besson focuses on spectrography, reducing everything beneath the surface to a single shaft of declining light, a photocline, or at least understanding the surface itself as a topography, as evinced in the film's central, sublime spectacle - the surface of the ocean as viewed from beneath, in a kind of vision of how it might feel to gaze up at the sky from the very centre of the earth. There's also very little interest in marine flora and fauna, just because the main diver (Barr) is already semi-marine, making his whole romantic interaction with an American journalist (Rosanna Arquette) feel strangely redundant, if only because his pansexual proclivities mean he's as likely to be electrocuted by an eel - his best childhood friend - as by a woman, subsuming sexual pleasure into his dances with dolphins, part of a more general connection between swimming and flight, marine and terrestrial atmospheres. If there's a problem, it's that the frenetic, hyperactive terrestrial scenes offset the beauty and languor of the submarine world - and, while this certainly clarifies Besson's cinematic progeny as so many aquatic mammals, torn between a kinetic terrestrial frenzy and deep blue fluidity, it also makes his 1992 abstract documentary, Atlantis, which takes place entirely underwater, more immersive, if less strikingly sublime.