PremiumNewsletter | The Deepest Breath And The Plurality Of Love
This is 'Viewing Room', a column by OTTplay's critic Rahul Desai, on the intersections of pop culture and life. Here: Notes on The Deepest Breath.
Last Updated: 03.33 PM, Oct 22, 2023
This column was originally published as part of our newsletter Stream Of Consciousness on October 22, 2023. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)
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THE OTHER DAY, I was in the mood to watch a sports documentary. I spent a whole hour scrolling; I had seen most of the good ones. Then I came across The Deepest Breath on Netflix. I hovered around the title, wondering whether the story of a “champion freediver’s quest to break a world record” would take my breath away. (The prospect of using aqua-puns for a future essay drove my enthusiasm). Being an avid swimmer myself, I took the plunge. My delusions led me to believe that perhaps my lungs would learn new techniques — and my body, new rhythms — from the film. It wouldn’t be like the time I sped off on my cycle after getting inspired by Tour de France: Unchained, only to turn back after minutes of mild rain. I’m good at staying underwater, both figuratively and literally. It repositions breathing from necessity to privilege. And maybe I’d be more alive to the world above if I mastered the art of finding my depth.
It emerged very soon that Laura McGann’s profile of Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini is no sports documentary. My body would have to wait. But my heart was activated. The stunning deep-sea photography, compassionate lens and narrative evoked memories of My Octopus Teacher, an unlikely love story disguised as a nature documentary. Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s Oscar-winning feature chronicled a transformative year in the life of a South African freediver who forges a platonic bond with a wild octopus. Their fluid relationship is slow but sure — she learns to trust, he learns to nurture, they learn to co-exist. The mollusk saves the man at his lowest point, sparking in him a renewed desire to thrive. The catch: Their time together is limited. I settled into my couch, then, as The Deepest Breath became an unlikely love story camouflaged as a sports documentary. The octopus here was a human: An Irish diver named Stephen Keenan.
The fates of Alessia and Stephen collide during one of her many record-breaking dives. Their first kiss occurs in the Bahamas. Except it’s not as romantic as it sounds. Stephen resuscitates Alessia after she blacks out: The liplock is him breathing life into her. But their intimacy is rooted in the rules of this extreme sport: Stephen is a safety diver when they meet. His job is to save. His desire to empower the sport bleeds into life. His becomes the first face she sees when she succeeds. His is also the first face she sees when she fades. Stephen’s support — where his mere silhouette becomes Alessia’s guiding light — drives her to greater heights and higher depths. The calming sight of him waiting near the top, alert and willing to legitimise her drive, renews her everything-ship with the water. She trains at his freediving shop on the coast of Egypt — and they fall, together, in love. And together, they set their sights on her final frontier: The Blue Hole.
The final act of the documentary revolves around Alessia’s doomed attempt to conquer the deadly submarine sinkhole. Despite months of planning, the dive goes awry, and Alessia loses her way while coming back up. The last recorded shot of Stephen reveals him darting towards the dot of Alessia — his own lungs running on empty — and shepherding her towards the surface. His decision is not dissimilar to the one Jack makes in Titanic: Only one can survive. The diving community goes into mourning. Alessia’s legacy finds its asterisk. When she recalls the incident on camera, brimming eyes and choked-up voice, it’s hard to imagine a void — an emotional sinkhole — that’s as personal and public at once. Their triumph morphs into her tragedy; his life widens her loss. The tragedy is so fabled that it unfolds like fiction.
At this point, my mind was flooded with rescue-is-the-grammar-of-romance metaphors. Of course Alessia and Stephen were meant to be. At some level, we all look at love as a breath of fresh air, which automatically implies that we get rescued from previous versions of ourselves. Most relationships are shaped by the trust that’s found between swimmers and safety divers. Everyone is the protagonist of their own journey — support simply wears the societal identity of love. Romance is, after all, a negotiation between taking the plunge and surfacing for air; between limitlessness and rules; between risk-taking and refuge; between heart and head. Alessia goes on to break many more records after Stephen dies. Their paths had crossed when she was on the brink of sporting immortality; Stephen became her mortal push. But the documentary maintains a respectful distance from her aftermath. It does not pretend to understand her loss. And to its enduring credit, it refuses to suggest that grief becomes the cornerstone of her greatness. It refuses to reduce her to a narrative trope.
For a while, this made me think about the role of companionship in my life. I wondered about the many ways in which my partner was my safety diver. I was reminded of the many ways in which I was her rescue diver. And I was crippled by the fear of one of us losing the other. Imagine swimming all the way down, breaking barriers, doing the difficult part, holding your breath and slowly wading back up only to see nobody waiting. Forget being each other’s divers, I think we are each other’s surfaces. The sight of one another is often a sign that air and light lie beyond; it is a prelude to the arrival of the sky. We derive hope and strength near the top, like adult newborns bursting into the world after being formed by the insides of a (water) body.
It also made me think of how love looks like a story only after it ends. Alessia and Stephen were discovering each other — a free-diving power couple of sorts — but their togetherness was natural. It felt like they found each other like any two strangers or professionals might. But Stephen’s death somehow feels like a culmination of something that already existed. Perhaps it’s the lingering sense of loss leading up to it. They seem special together because it’s almost like they — and we — suspect it’s temporary. The film-making is such that it’s almost like they know it — or someone — will pass.
But it’s the last 10 minutes of the documentary that altered my relationship with it. It’s not that my reading suddenly felt invalid. But it did feel like a mirage that hid a desert of grainy truths. Most of us are conditioned to engage with art through the lens of loftier narratives: Romance, familyhood, marriage, parents. I found — and fetishised — the love story perhaps because that’s what I was trained to recognize. But The Deepest Breath zooms out from Alessia towards the end; life emerges from within a profile. It closes with a portrait of the human that was, not the person that died. It conveys a language of living, not the silence of leaving. It outlines the magnanimity of a man, not the generosity of his memory. It’s when I realised that Stephen is more than his love story with Alessia. He is more than the woman he saved. He is more than the legend he left behind.
Colleagues, friends and family speak of Stephen Keenan. These are not posthumous words. You can tell that they’ve said this about Stephen even when he was around, when he was maybe in another room or continent. They speak of Stephen’s zest for exploration, for discovery, for drifting, for thinking, and for seizing the moment. He spent his 20s traveling to all corners of the globe. He saw all the places and cultures he dreamed of as a child. He worked his way through the planet. Days before he was set to return to Ireland, he stopped at sunny Dahab. And he never left. He fell in love with the sport of diving, became an instructor and made it his home. It was too late to dominate the sport, but it wasn’t too late to preserve its humanity.
That’s where he would charm anyone who had the fortune of meeting him. They speak of how nobody ever had beef with Stephen. He was unanimously liked; he had time for clients and friends alike; he was popular without trying. He had this infectious personality — a twinkle in his eye, a round-ticket of a laugh — that was impossible to resist. Divers and tourists came and went, enriched by their exchanges with Stephen; they would always remember “that cool instructor” with no hang-ups. In a way, he was breathing life into people much before he entered the water. How can one guy make such a profound dent in multiple lives, they wonder. How can one mate feel like everyone’s soulmate?
The thing is: Stephen wasn’t too good to be true. He was real, all flesh and blood, a miracle man disguised as an everyman. He was, if anything, too true to not be good. Hearing about the late diver was like hearing about my late friend, who died of cancer earlier this year. I’ll call him ‘A’. When A passed away, I felt incredibly lonely. It felt as if I was the only one who had lost a best friend, a brother, a companion. He had this magical way of making me feel special. When we traveled together, I felt like his only friend; nothing and nobody else mattered. In our video calls, his curiosity about my life made me feel important. The empathy of his texts left me on (very) ‘seen’. So the pain felt fiercely personal. I wanted to be the only one suffering, because it implied that I was the central character of his life.
But every day since A left has been a bittersweet reminder that he was more. More than our bond. More than his gravitational force on my orbit. More than his voice in my head. The outpouring of exclusive memories and inclusive grief suggests that, like Stephen, A was both conjunction and adjective at once. He had separate but full connections with everyone who knew him. And he made everyone feel like they were the one — not in a deceptive two-timing way, but in a gentle I-got-you way. Using past tense to write about him is weird, because he always lived in the present-continuous. He left a mark on every human he met; he took in every place he visited; he moved (between) people and countries with a hunger for new experiences. He belonged to multiple galaxies, multiple oceans, and he was the best rescue diver in nearly all of them.
I thought I’d be jealous to discover this. Maybe I sensed it all along. But hindsight is not always a cruel judge. I’m genuinely in awe of how A made such a positive impact across groups and timezones, in an age where spats and gossip and misunderstandings fly around faster than germs. He was the glue in all of them: a fantasy football gang, two college gangs, a school gang, a colleague gang, an ex-colleague gang, a childhood gang, a Muscat gang, a Vellore gang, a Bangalore gang. He made every hour count; his priorities were neater than flowcharts. I used to joke with him that being (romantically) single for so long was his scheme to create more space and mental bandwidth for family and friends. But I knew it wasn’t a joke. It’s a choice he made, subverting the typically millennial meanings of loneliness and self-worth. Being single allowed him to embrace the prospect of emotional plurality. He manufactured time out of thin air. He gave attachment a new sound. Those eight tentacles became eighty.
And not once did it seem like he was lacking any dimension of ‘normalcy’. His love was too versatile — too dextrous — to be limited by labels. His friends were his partners; his family were his soulmates. Every person became a piece in his flexible puzzle of identities. I found a kindred soul in him. Even though I had been in and out of relationships since my teenage years, I had resisted settling-down arcs because I wanted to expand my world rather than compress it. We shared that passion. But it’s only in him that people learnt to recognise and respect it. He looked like the best-case scenario, unlike me, who often succumbed to bouts of performative angst. That I now notice I wasn’t the only one he protected and saved, again and again, speaks volumes of his ability to be shapeless. It proves that he had the power to be different while being the same.
While it’s tempting to convey that, cruelly, Stephen Keenan died the moment he defied his porosity and devoted himself to one person, it’s inaccurate. The Blue Hole was the culmination of who he always was. Alessia was his girlfriend, but she was also just another athlete he strived to help. The reason he had a solid reputation was because he had once put himself on the line to rescue a champion male diver; nobody had seen that kind of commitment and timing from a safety diver. So when Alessia swims up the wrong route, he isn’t doing so much as being. In choosing her over himself, Stephen stayed true to his devotion to people — and his altruistic sense of adventure. His journey exuded the courage to be free, not carefree. His final act was one of listening rather than hearing; of seeing rather than watching. Heaven only becomes the newest visa stamp on his passport.
That’s the triumph of this documentary. It uses a poignant love story to reveal a life that democratised the notion of love. It uses the depth of a face to hint at a body that cannot be reduced to any single part. It’s the equivalent of a film staging my bond with A — or the story of his family’s final days with him — as the foreground, only to show that he shaped the background of many parallel narratives. He was everywhere else like he was nowhere else. Some of us may not remember our last conversation with him the same way we can’t recall the exact moment a childhood ends, or a grandparent becomes the past, or an old friendship fades. Because we’re not supposed to; his whole has always been greater than the sentimental sum of its parts.
Memories only give us something to identify him by. They offer us the chance to believe that he is both a deep sigh and the deepest breath. Memories are also private souvenirs. After all, A is the first letter and vowel of multiple languages. Singularity is its nature. But I now know that he was not just a guy. He is the guy. He was not just a documentary I chanced upon while scrolling. He is the non-fiction masterpiece that made everyone stop scrolling.