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"Slipping without falling" is the sensation sought, Luc Besson reaches for it by imagining the sea as no less otherworldly than outer space, both zones given to photogenic anti-gravitational grace. Free-diving rivals, plunging into the Mediterranean for sunken doubloons as boys and crossing paths as adults in the world championship circuit. The French athlete (Jean-Marc Barr) is found in gelid Andean lakes, stupefying scientists with his control of blood and oxygen, "a phenomenon that's only been observed in whales and dolphins. Until now." (Rosanna Arquette as a New York flibbertigibbet watches in awe, and takes home his heartbeat printed on a cardiac scan.) His Sicilian competitor (Jean Reno) is a strapping boaster with whom he shares a Hawksian ethos, just a couple of pals testing their lungs in aquatic abysses. The only deeper bond is with bottle-nosed cetaceans, much to the chagrin of the girlfriend yearning for terra firma stability. "Who won?" "What? The asshole award? Let me tell you, it was a tie!" The Zen merman, a simple joke exhaustively realized in Besson's marathon of marine swoon. Bored at a ceremony, the two daredevils raise a toast at the bottom of a swimming pool and are rushed to the hospital in dripping tuxedos. A drowned father rests behind the hero's aloofness across the globe, his home is a bathtub where the addled uncle dons snorkel and blasts Wagner. "I'm trying another world," as Eric Serra's muzak has it, "and the sky slowly fades in my mind..." Klee blues, Klein blues, a gargantuan undulating canvas for concepts of innocence and obsession to rattle in. To consummate the search is to ditch the pregnant Yank for a whole ocean of amniotic fluid. "Is this a poem?" "No, it's a recipe for spaghetti frutti del mare." James Cameron takes it from there, evidently. Cinematography by Carlo Varini. With Paul Shenar, Sergio Castellitto, Jean Bouise, Marc Duret, and Griffin Dunne.
--- Fernando F. Croce |