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The Big Blue (Le grand bleu)

Children Jacques Mayol and Enzo Molinari grow up in Amorgos, Greece in the 1960s. Enzo challenges Jacques to collect a coin on the sea floor but Jacques refuses. Jacques' father—who harvests shellfish from the seabed using a pump-supplied air hose and helmet —goes diving. His breathing apparatus and rope gets caught and punctured by rocks, and weighed down by water, he drowns in front of the children.

By the 1980s, both are well known for their freediving skills. In Sicily, Enzo rescues a trapped diver from a shipwreck. He is a world champion freediver and now wishes to find Jacques and persuade him to return to no-limits freediving to prove he is still the better of the two. Jacques works as a human research subject with dolphins and is participating in research into human physiology in the lakes of the Peruvian Andes, where his bodily responses to cold water immersion are being recorded. Insurance broker Johana Baker visits the station and is introduced to Jacques. After hearing that Jacques will be at the World Diving Championships in Taormina, Sicily, she fabricates an insurance problem that requires her presence there, to meet him again. The two start dating. However, neither of them realizes the extent of Jacques' allure for the deep. Jacques beats Enzo by 1 metre, and Enzo offers him a crystal dolphin as a gift, and a tape measure to show the small difference between their respective records. Johana goes back home to New York but is fired after her deception is discovered; she leaves New York and begins to live with Jacques. She hears the story that mermaids appear to the ones who truly love the sea and lead them to an enchanted place.

At the next World Diving Championships, Enzo beats Jacques' record. The depths at which the divers compete enter new territory, and the dive doctor suggests they should stop, to no avail. Jacques is asked to look at a dolphinarium where a new dolphin has been placed, and where the dolphins are no longer performing; surmising that the new dolphin is homesick, the three of them break in at night to liberate and return her to the sea. Back at the competition, other divers attempt to break Enzo's world record, but each fails. Jacques succeeds, reaching 400 feet (120 m). Angered by this, Enzo prepares to break Jacques' record. The doctor warns that the competitors must not go deeper, as the pressure becomes lethal at those depths. Enzo dismisses the doctor and attempts the dive anyway but is unable to return to the surface. Jacques dives to rescue him. Enzo, dying, tells Jacques that he was right and that it is better down there. He begs Jacques to help him back down to the depths, where he belongs. Distraught, Jacques refuses, and Enzo dies in his arms. To honor his dying wish, Jacques takes Enzo's body back down to a depth where the human body becomes negatively buoyant, and lets his friend sink into the depths. Jacques—himself suffering from cardiac arrest after the dive—is rescued by supervising scuba divers and requires his heart to be restarted with a defibrillator before being placed in medical quarters to recover.

Jacques appears to be recovering from the diving accident but later experiences a hallucinatory dream in which the ceiling collapses and the room fills with water, and he finds himself in the ocean depths with dolphins. After discovering she is pregnant, Johana returns to check up on Jacques but finds him lying unresponsive in his bed with bloody ears and a bloody nose. Johana attempts to help him, but Jacques gets up and walks to the diving boat and gets suited up for one final dive. Desperately, Johana begs Jacques not to go, saying she is alive but whatever has happened at the depths is not, but he says he has to. She announces she is pregnant and begs Jacques to stay. However, she eventually lets him go. The two embrace and Johana breaks down crying. Jacques then places the release cord for the dive ballast in her hand, and—still sobbing—she pulls it, sending him down to the depths. Jacques descends and floats for a moment, staring into the darkness. A dolphin then appears, and Jacques lets go of his harness, swimming away with it into the darkness.