Rediscover the beauty of the ocean, the seabed and the seven seas with this superb The Big Blue Poster!
- Paper characteristics:
- 🎨 Canvas: global standard in terms of printing and imitating a “painting canvas” look.
- By default, the poster contains a 4cm white border for framing (frame not included). If you don’t want it, please choose “without white border”.
- ✅ Size: Multiple choices available. ✅
- High UV resistance.
- Color vibrancy maximum, glare-free.
- Paper recycled, guaranteeing environmental friendliness.
- Poster packaged carefully and delivered in a protective tube for total protection.
- FREE STANDARD DELIVERY.
⚠️ Frame not included. ⚠️
Description of this The Big Blue Poster
The Big Blue is a 1988 drama film in the Cinéma du look visual style, directed by French director Luc Besson. It is a heavily fictionalized and dramatized story of the friendship and sporting rivalry between two contemporary 20th-century freediving champions: Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr) and Enzo Maiorca (renamed “Enzo Molinari” and played by Jean Reno), as well as Mayol’s fictional relationship with his girlfriend Johana Baker (played by Rosanna Arquette).
The film became one of France’s biggest commercial successes (although an adaptation for the United States was a commercial failure there). French President Jacques Chirac referred to the film when describing Mayol, after his death in 2001, as an enduring symbol for the “big blue” generation.[4]
The story has been heavily adapted for film. In real life, Mayol lived from 1927 to 2001, and Maiorca retired from diving to pursue politics in the 1980s. Both set deep diving records with no category limit below 100 meters, and Mayol did participate in scientific research into human aquatic potential, but neither reached 400 feet (120 meters) as depicted in the film, and they were not direct competitors. Mayol wrote the film’s screenplay himself.[5] Mayol’s search for love, family, “wholeness,” and the meaning of life and death, as well as the conflict and tension between his yearning for the depths and his relationship with his girlfriend, are also major elements of the latter part of the film.
Two children, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Molinari, grew up on the Greek island of Amorgos in the 1960s. Enzo challenges Jacques to pick up a coin from the bottom of the sea, but Jacques refuses. Later, Jacques’s father, who is diving, harvesting shells from the seabed using an air hose and helmet supplied by a pump. His breathing apparatus and rope are caught and pierced by rocks on the reef, and, weighed down by the water, he drowns. Jacques and Enzo can do nothing but watch in horror as he is killed.
In the 1980s, both are renowned freedivers, swimmers capable of remaining underwater for long periods and at great depths. Enzo is now in Sicily, where he rescues a diver trapped in a shipwreck. He is a world freediving champion and has a strong personality. He now wishes to find Jacques and persuade him to return to freediving without limits in order to prove that he is still the better of the two, in a friendly sporting rivalry. Jacques himself works extensively with scientific research as a human research subject, and with dolphins, and temporarily participates in research on human physiology in the frozen lakes of the Peruvian Andes, where his remarkable, dolphin-like bodily reactions to immersion in cold water are recorded. Johana Baker, an insurance broker, visits the resort for professional reasons and is introduced to Jacques. She secretly falls in love with him. When she learns that Jacques will be attending the World Diving Championships in Taormina, Sicily, she invents an insurance problem that requires her to be there in order to meet him again. She and Jacques fall in love. However, neither of them realizes the extent of Jacques’s attraction to the depths. Jacques beats Enzo by a meter, and Enzo gives him a crystal dolphin, as well as a tape measure to show the small difference between Jacques’s and Enzo’s records. Johana returns home to New York, but is fired after her deception is discovered; she leaves New York and begins living with Jacques. She hears the story that if one truly loves the depths of the sea, a mermaid will appear in the depths of the sea and lead the diver to an enchanted place.
At the next World Diving Championships, Enzo beats Jacques’s record. The depths the divers are competing at are new, and the dive doctor suggests they stop the competition, but the divers decide to continue. Jacques is asked to examine a local dolphinarium where a new dolphin has been placed and dolphins no longer perform. Assuming the new dolphin is homesick, the three men break into the dolphinarium at night to free the dolphin and return it to the sea. Back at the competition, other divers attempt to beat Enzo’s new record, but all fail. Jacques then attempts his next dive and reaches 400 feet (120 m), breaking Enzo’s world record. Furious, Enzo prepares to beat Jacques’s new world record. The doctor supervising the dive warns the competitors that they must not go any deeper—based on Jacques’s bodily reactions, at around 400 feet, the conditions, and especially the pressure, will become lethal, and the divers will be killed if they persist in attempting such depths. Enzo ignores this advice and attempts the dive anyway, but he is unable to surface. Jacques dives in to save him. The dying Enzo tells Jacques that he was right and that it is better down there, and begs him to help him descend to the depths where he belongs. The grief-stricken Jacques refuses, but after Enzo dies in his arms, he finally honors his dying wish and brings Enzo’s body to 400 feet, leaving him adrift on the ocean floor. Jacques, who himself suffers a cardiac arrest after the dive, is rescued and brought to the surface by supervising divers. His heart has to be restarted with a defibrillator before being taken to a medical facility to recover.
Jacques appears to be recovering from his diving accident, but then he has a strange hallucinatory dream in which the ceiling collapses, the room fills with water, and he finds himself in the depths of the ocean surrounded by dolphins. Johana, who has just discovered she is pregnant, returns to Jacques in the middle of the night but finds him awake but unresponsive in his bed, his ears and nose bleeding. Johana tries to help him, but Jacques starts to get up and heads to the empty dive boat to get dressed and dive one last time. Desperately, Johana begs Jacques not to go, saying she is alive but what happened in the depths is not, but he says he has to do it. She tells Jacques she’s pregnant and sadly begs him to stay, but he finally understands he must go. The two embrace, and Johana breaks down in tears. Jacques then places the diving weight release cord in her hand, and, still sobbing, she pulls it, sending him into the depths he loves. Jacques descends and floats for a short time, staring into the darkness. A dolphin then appears; Jacques releases his harness and swims with it into the darkness.