Le grand bleu (1988)

Le grand bleu/The Big Blue (Luc Besson, 1988) is a beautiful and serene French film. Jean-Marc Barr plays French diver Jacques Mayol, alongside Rosanna Arquette and Jean Reno. Le grand bleu became the most financially successful film in France in the 1980s.


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 3. Photo: Jean-Marc Barr in Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 5. Photo: Marc Duret and Jean Reno (right) in Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 6. Photo: Jean-Marc Barr and Rosanna Arquette in Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 7. Photo: publicity still for Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988) with Jean-Marc Barr.

Eternal heaven

Le grand bleu/The Big Blue (1988) is a fictionalised and dramatised story of the friendship and sporting rivalry between two leading contemporary champion free divers in the 20th century: Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr) and Enzo Maiorca (renamed to Enzo Molinari and played by Jean Reno), and Mayol's fictionalised relationship with his girlfriend Johana Baker (played by Rosanna Arquette).

The film covers their childhood in 1960s Greece to their deaths in a 1980s Sicilian diving competition. Jacques and Enzo are fascinated by the sea but for different reasons. If Enzo devotes all his energies to diving to access success and glory, the sea is more than this for Jacques.

For Jacques, the ocean is a place of athletic competition, an ideal place for rest and entertainment where dolphins are his real and sole friends, and finally, it's his eternal heaven. He was born with it, he swears by it and the sea will lead him to his death.

Mayol's and Maiorca's stories were heavily adapted for cinema. In real life, Mayol lived from 1927 to 2001 and Maiorca retired from diving to politics in the 1980s. Both set no-limits category deep diving records below 100 metres.

Mayol was involved in scientific research into human aquatic potential. However, neither reached 400 feet (122 metres) as portrayed in the film, and they were not direct competitors. Mayol himself was a screenwriter for the film.


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 1. Photo: publicity still for Le grand bleu (Luc Besson, 1988) with Jean Reno and Sergio Castellitto.


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 2. Photo: Jean-Marc Barr in Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 4. Photo: publicity still for Le grand bleu (Luc Besson, 1988) with Jean Reno.


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 8. Photo: publicity still for Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).

Le look

Luc Besson was initially unsure of whom to cast in the main role of Jacques Mayol. He initially offered the role to Christopher Lambert and Mickey Rourke and even considered himself for the role until someone suggested Jean-Marc Barr. Besson has a cameo appearance as one of the divers in the film.

Le grand bleu/The Big Blue meant Besson's international breakthrough. It's a key film which divided the French public between those who saw the film only as a tedious documentary about the ocean and those who acclaimed this as passionate filmmaking.

The film is one of the finest examples of the 'Cinéma du look' visual style of the 1980s. Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax are the main directors of 'Le Look'. Their films had a slick, gorgeous visual style and a focus on young, alienated characters.

Le grand bleu/The Big Blue is a cult classic in the diving fraternity. It was nominated for several César Awards and won the César Award for Best Music Written for a Film (Eric Serra) and Best Sound in 1989. The film also won France's National Academy of Cinema's Academy Award in 1989. Besson's film also became one of France's biggest box office hits. It sold 9,193,873 tickets in France alone and played in French theatres for a year. While popular in Europe, an adaptation for the US release was a commercial failure in that country.

DB Dumonteil at IMDb: "Le Grand bleu also ranks among the movies that you must watch rather than telling it. Of course, there isn't almost any plot, dialogues are short and rare but the pictures are gorgeous enough to create an entrancing climate supported by Eric Serra's mesmerising music.


French postcard by Especially for you, Ref. 30. Photo: publicity still for Le grand bleu (Luc Besson, 1988). Jean-Marc Barr, Rosanna Arquette and Luc Besson at the set.


French postcard by News Productions, Beaulmes, no 56063. Photo: Eric Coiffier. Director and cast of Le Grand bleu (Luc Besson, 1988) at the Festival de Cannes, 1988. In the front row from left to right: Marc Duret, Jean-Marc Barr, Rosanna Arquette, Luc Besson, Sergio Castellitto and Andréas Voutsinas. In the back: Jean Reno.


French postcard by Editions F. Nugeron, no. E 489. Image: Gaumont. French poster by Malinowski for Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).


French postcard by Editions Ramsay / Editions F. Nugeron, no. 49. Image: Gaumont. French poster by Malinowski for the long version of Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).

Sources: DB Dumonteil (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

Jean-Marc Barr

Attractive French-American actor Jean-Marc Barr (1960) had his breakthrough with the French film Le Grand Bleu/The Big Blue (Luc Besson, 1988). He is best known for his roles for Lars von Trier in Europa/Zentropa (1991), Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dogville (2003).


French postcard by Editions Champs Libres, no. ST 116, 1989.

The Big Blue

Jean-Marc Barr was born in Bitburg, Germany, in 1960. His father was American and his mother was French and he is fluent in both French and English. His father, working in the US Armed Forces, was stationed in West Germany. The family moved to California in 1974.

In 1978, Barr graduated from Mission Bay High School in San Diego, California. Barr's parents wished him to join the armed forces but he was unwilling to follow in his father's footsteps. He studied philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Paris Conservatoire and the Sorbonne. He moved to London to pursue an education in drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Barr made his film debut as Absalom in King David (Bruce Beresford, 1985) with Richard Gere. He began working in theatre in France in 1986. He soon found work in television including a small role in Hotel du Lac (1986), the BBC's version of the Booker prize-winning novel by Anita Brookner. He also appeared in the films Hope and Glory (John Boorman, 1987) and Maurice (James Ivory, 1987).

He had his breakthrough when he was cast in the tremendously successful French film Le Grand Bleu/The Big Blue (Luc Besson, 1988). He played French diver Jacques Mayol, alongside Rosanna Arquette and Jean Reno. Le Grand Bleu became the most financially successful film in France in the 1980s.

At IMDb, Luis Filipe dos Reis Peres tries to describe the special effect the film has on its viewers: “I never before saw a film that I could identify myself so much with. I´m lucky enough to live in a place near the sea very similar and as beautiful as those in the movie and the opening scenes always remind me of my teenage years and the waters I explored like young Jacques Mayol does in the beginning of the movie. (...) I guess that´s the beauty of this movie. It makes us feel that we could be any of its characters because they´re so real. We almost can´t believe that they don´t exist outside of the movie. This is an amazing, beautifully well-written, acted, photographed and directed movie! It carries us into an extraordinary world.”


French postcard by Ciné Passion, no. GB 7. Photo: publicity still for Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988).


French postcard by Especially for you, Ref. 30. Photo: publicity still for Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988). Jean-Marc Barr, Rosanna Arquette and Luc Besson on the set.


French postcard by News Productions, Beaulmes, no 56063. Photo: Eric Coiffier. Director and cast of Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988) at the Festival de Cannes, 1988. In the front row from left to right: Marc Duret, Jean-Marc Barr, Rosanna Arquette, Luc Besson, Sergio Castellitto and Andréas Voutsinas. Behind them: Jean Reno.

Zentropa

In 1991, Jean-Marc Barr starred opposite Barbara Sukowa and Udo Kier in Danish director Lars von Trier's Europa/Zentropa. It marked the beginning of a long friendship as well as a significant professional relationship. He went on to appear in Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) with Emily Watson, Dancer in the Dark (2000) with Björk and Catherine Deneuve, Dogville (2004), Manderlay (2005), Direktøren for det hele/The Boss of It All (2006) and both parts of Nymph()maniac (2013) with Charlotte Gainsbourg. He appeared as the main character in the video for Blur's single, Charmless Man (1995). Films in which he starred were The Scarlet Tunic (Stuart St. Paul, 1997) and J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche/Don't Let Me Die on a Sunday (Didier Le Pêcheur, 1999) with Élodie Bouchez.

Barr’s collaboration with Lars von Trier put him on track to start directing his own work in the Dogme95 style. He debuted as a director, screenwriter and producer with the intimate love story Lovers (1999). The film became the first part of a trilogy, together with the drama Too Much Flesh (2000) and the comedy Being Light (2001), which he both co-directed with Pascal Arnold. Barr and Arnold also directed Chacun sa nuit/One to Another (2006), American Translation (2011) and Sexual Chronicles of a French Family (2012).

As an actor, he appeared as Hugo in La sirène rouge/The Red Siren (Olivier Megaton, 2002) opposite Asia Argento, as divorce lawyer Maitre Bertram in the Merchant Ivory film Le Divorce (James Ivory, 2003) and as the studly, horny 'island plumber' Didier in the witty comedy Crustacés et Coquillages/Cockles & Muscles (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2005).

Barr played Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac in the film adaptation of Kerouac’s autobiographical novel Big Sur (Michael Polish, 2013). Nathan Southern at AllMovie: “The Polish movie nails Kerouac's paradigm in its many different guises, including the exhilaration of his road cruises with his buddies, the zen of his naturalism, and his creative impotence and inner sexual death. Those assets shouldn't be underestimated, particularly in light of the many individuals over the years who have branded Kerouac's work ‘unfilmable’; Polish proves them wrong. And the lead performances are outstanding across the board. Jean-Marc Barr evokes the real Kerouac (visually and emotionally) with such approximation that we may feel we're watching a documentary.”

Jean-Marc Barr's latest films are the Science-Fiction romantic comedy The Pod Generation (Sophie Barthes, 2023), the drama This Is the End (Vincent Dieutre, 2023) and the historical drama White Friar (Ivan Murphy, 2023). Upcoming is the horror film Hexameron (Wiktor Grodecki, 2024) situated in Europe after the outbreak of the Black Death. Ken Duken plays an ascetic Monk who falls in love with the Devil. Jean-Marc Barr was married to Irina Decermic. He is the godfather of the children of Lars von Trier.


British postcard by ABC, London. Photo: publicity still for The Scarlet Tunic (Stuart St. Paul, 1998).

Sources: Nathan Southern (AllMovie), Luis Filipe dos Reis Peres (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 4 May 2023.