The Big Blue (Grand Bleu, Le): Extended Version (1988)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Theatrical Trailer-1.66:1, not 16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0
Rating
Year Of Production	1988
Running Time	160:20
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (80:07)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Luc Besson
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Rosanna Arquette Jean-Marc Barr Jean Reno Paul Shenar Sergio Castellitto Marc Duret Griffin Dunne
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Eric Serra

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Dutch English French	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Why am I intrigued? Well, for starters I have no idea exactly what it is all about. This would seem to be a common reaction to the film, apparently. I will make a woefully pathetic attempt to provide a brief synopsis - as to what it is about, I shall leave that to your own musings after you have seen the film, for I am sure that there are dozens of ways that you can interpret this film. The broad story here is the lifelong friendship, and to some extent rivalry, of Enzo Molinari (Jean Reno) and Jacques Mayol (Jean-Marc Barr). We first meet them as youngsters in the Greek isles, where they enjoy a rivalry over their diving prowess. Following the death of Jacques' father in a diving accident, we jump forward to 1988 when Enzo is now the Free Diving World Champion. He is still living the island life and making a few dollars from his prodigious free diving capabilities. After one especially profitable little dive, he decides to track down Jacques and get him to the next World Championship in Sicily. Jacques is now located in Peru, diving in a frozen lake, where he meets up with a slightly besotted Johana (Rosanna Arquette), an insurance assessor who is down at the lake following an accident. Jacques heads to Sicily to meet up with Enzo whilst Johana returns to New York, only to find that she is in love with Jacques and promptly heads off to Sicily in pursuit. What follows is a rather lengthy investigation of relationships - mainly between the sea (otherwise known as The Big Blue) and Jacques, but also between Enzo and Jacques (especially over the world championship) and the increasingly bemused Johana and Jacques.

    It is an extremely difficult story to categorize, but it has certainly been made into a watchable enough film in the hands of Luc Besson. Some of the plot I find a little too incredulous (like every heterosexual male would rather go off and spend an evening frolicking with a dolphin, as opposed to frolicking with a naked Rosanna Arquette), a little too clichéd (love at first sight on a frozen lake in the middle of the Peruvian Andes) and the dialogue a little trite (Jacques having no reason to return from the serenity of the deep - yeah right, with a naked Rosanna Arquette up on the surface...). Okay, I know I am being a little harsh here, but I guess the point is that the material does not quite sustain this extended version of the film as well as perhaps it needs to. However, what the film does do is give us plenty of time to put up with the brilliant Jean Reno in another great role. His sheer personality carries this whole film in my view. Jean-Marc Barr is just a tad overshadowed here, although he does portray a nice degree of naivety about life away from the water. I doubt too many would proclaim Rosanna Arquette a great actress, and at times here she is way out of her depth (I just had to get that pun in somewhere - sorry). But, she does hold her end of a somewhat bizarre love triangle fairly well, and the perplexedness she demonstrates comes over as very genuine. But there are two things that really hold this film together - some absolutely brilliant cinematography, and the direction of Luc Besson.

    Perplexing. Enigmatic. Profound. Poignant. There are many tags that can be thrown at this film, but at the end of the day they will all devolve down to one issue - it is a film that demands your attention and will garner it. If you are fortunate enough to understand this on first viewing, then you are in some ways to be pitied as this is a film that demands repeated viewings. It is definitely not to everyone's taste, and it does test the limits of endurance somewhat, but it makes every effort to evoke the pull of The Big Blue.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and it is 16x9 enhanced.

    The age of the film is belied a little by the minor inconsistencies in the sharpness of the transfer. Overall, this is a quite sharp transfer throughout, with odd moments of superb sharpness. Detail is generally pretty good too, although the inconsistencies here were perhaps a tad more noticeable. The main problem is the slightly disappointing shadow detail throughout the film. Whilst this may be an inherent problem of the film, I did find it a little frustrating, especially as the tone of the transfer is quite rich most of the time. It is generally a clear transfer although there are some rather noticeable lapses here too, with a few segments being quite "dirty" in appearance. There was just a tad more grain here at times than I would have liked. There were a couple of instances where low level noise seemed to be a problem in the transfer. Overall, though, I am reasonably happy with this twelve year old film's transfer to the digital domain.

    Given that the location is the Mediterranean, the predominant scenery colours are muted and this has been well-captured by the transfer. However, the rest of the transfer exhibits tones just a little on the rich side, which are not quite so convincing in my view. This is mainly a problem with skin tones, which did not seem to be consistent throughout. There were no problems with oversaturation of colours during the film, nor was colour bleed an issue, other than during the opening blue credits which did exhibit some noticeable bleed and a little flaring, too.

    There are no apparent MPEG artefacts in the transfer. Unfortunately there is a consistent problem with film-to-video artefacts, mainly aliasing. Although generally nothing too gross at any point, it is simply the consistency of it that eventually becomes too much to ignore. It never gets unwatchable but you always know it is there. There was also a sizeable problem with film artefacts in the film, often made very noticeable by the fact that they are white dirt marks popping up against the blue of the sea. They were mildly distracting to the film.

    This is an RSDL formatted disc, with the layer change placed almost dead halfway through the film at 80:07: it is a well placed change and is not too noticeable and not at all disruptive to the flow of the film.

Audio

    There are just two audio tracks on the DVD, both Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded efforts: one in English and the other in French. I listened to the English soundtrack, and in 160 minutes of watching the film completely forgot to check out the French effort. Sorry!

    Dialogue levels are all over the place here and I had a lot of difficulty in hearing what was being said at times: the volume control got a fair deal of work during this film. This is more than likely a film problem and not a transfer problem, as I vaguely recall having the same problem with the snippets of the tape that I had previously seen.

    There did not appear to be any problems with audio sync in the transfer.

    The music score comes from Eric Serra. What sort of inadequate words have I got to describe this effort? Superb. Evocative. Ethereal. Sorry, but it is just that good that my paltry attempts at superlatives will be totally inadequate. Wonderful stuff indeed, that just begged to get a 5.1 remastering to allow it to really bloom.

    Well, I remain stunned by the lack of a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, but complaining about what we have not got but should have got is not going to get this review written. Once the disappointment is put aside, it does start to dawn that this is actually a pretty decent soundtrack that makes effective, and often nicely understated, use of the surround channels. However, the lack of a bass channel is quite noticeable on a couple of occasions. Since this is generally an ethereal style of film, there are significant periods where not an awful lot apart from background music is happening, which of course demands a soundtrack with a lot of space in the mix. Whilst this is generally pretty good in that respect, I felt that it could perhaps have been a little better overall, just to improve the immediacy of the sound a little more. The overall soundscape is quite convincing though, and generally quite believable.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer (1:50)

• An additional pan and scan version of the film
• Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack
• Isolated Music Score

    A good video transfer.

    A pretty good audio transfer.

    An inadequate extras package, crying out for an audio commentary.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall