is the film faithful to the life of Commander Cousteau?

[Mis à jour le 11 janvier 2022 à 20h45] Lambert Wilson is Commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau in The odyssey. Directed by Jérôme Salle, this biopic looks back on the life of the oceanographic explorer, after he left the French Navy. The film also explores his relationship with his son, Philippe, who will sensitize him to the ecological cause. The screenplay was written from the stories Captain of the Calypso (Albert Falco, second to Cousteau, and Yves Paccalet, one of his collaborators) but also of the book My father the commander the explorer’s eldest son, Jean-Michel Cousteau.

A great deal of research work is carried out by the writers of The odyssey, Jérôme Salle and Laurent Turner: they thus met the relatives of the commander and learned about his life and his work, before embarking on the writing of the screenplay. “I really met almost all of the Cousteaus, remembers the director from Allociné! When I look at the list of Cousteaus in my phone, I realize that there are more of them than the members of my own family. ! ”

However, some differences are pointed out between what happens in the film. The odyssey and reality. The most important remains that the seaplane which caused the immediate death of Philippe Cousteau disintegrated on a sandbank during a waterproofing test, while in the film, we see him submerged, the captain’s son then struggling for its survival. Simone, Cousteau’s wife, was also more courteous and less violent than the image portrayed in the film, according to relatives. In addition, Jacques-Yves Cousteau would have been interested in ecology from the 1960s, and not ten years later as is the case in the film. He also worked on this subject with Philippe Diolé and Yves Pascalet, and not alone. Note also that the discoveries and inventions of Jacques-Yves Cousteau are only mentioned occasionally in The odyssey.

Synopsis – Thanks to his invention, an autonomous diving suit that allows you to breathe underwater, Jacques-Yves Cousteau discovers a new world, that of the sea, its fauna and its fauna. While living in a pretty house overlooking the Mediterranean Sea with his wife Simone and his two sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe, this French naval officer acquires an eight-year-old minesweeper, ” La Calypso ”. After numerous modifications, Commander Cousteau made it a well-equipped oceanographic research vessel. Its objective is to explore the underwater world and introduce it to a wide audience through documentary films …