The first woman to row across the North Atlantic in October 2003, then the Pacific in 2005, sailor Maud Fontenoy almost failed in her epic attempt to circumnavigate the Southern Hemisphere against the tide in March 2007 – and not “around the world”, a name strictly defined by the World Sailing Speed Record Council and whose criteria were not respected.
“Maud ended up arriving through tenacity,” said Jean-Luc Van Den Heede, on whose boat the 29-year-old woman achieved her feat. Since then, she has put her notoriety at the service of the oceans, creating her foundation in 2008, and going so far as to accept, in June 2015, the position of environmental delegate for the Les Républicains party. A political detour which earned him many enmities.
Through tenacity… Maud Fontenoy returns to the screen with the documentary series Bleu, which she imagined and in which she stars. Perhaps out of a taste for challenges, she chose, in the first episode on the Bahamas, to defend the unloved of the seas: sharks, overfished for their fins. Beyond the idyllic and telegenic setting offered by these 700 islands and islets off the coast of Florida, they are in fact home to the world’s first sanctuary for these sharks.
Humor and outspokenness
Every swimmer has “a 1 in 3.7 million chance of being attacked by a shark,” the commentary warns. Strangely, the statistics are not reassuring. On the other hand, the speakers relax with their humor and their frankness. Thus, Stuart Cove, Sean Connery’s diving double as James Bond, who takes Maud Fontenoy to evolve among the sharks.
Another strong personality, Cristina Zenato – “thirty years she has been taming sharks and removing their hooks with her bare hands”. After a long dialogue, the two women go diving to offer the most astonishing scene of the film: a large shark literally lies down on the sand to be caressed before asking for… a kiss.
Among the other notable scenes, the walk on the beach where Jaws (1975) was partly filmed. But also snorkeling with a traditional conch fisherman, injecting amoxicillin into sick corals, visiting the Coral Vita experimental coral nursery, or wandering in the mangrove, near the Shark Lab, the most large known nursery of the lemon shark.
If we can regret the lack of originality of the staging, while animal documentaries continue to be renewed, this Bleu by Maud Fontenoy on the Bahamas has the merit of embodying the complexity of the issues, giving voice to entrepreneurs, researchers, fishermen in this country where 68% of resources come from ecotourism. Eighteen months before the United Nations Ocean Conference, which will be held in Nice in 2025.