Stream It Or Skip It: ‘No Limit’ on Netflix, a French Drama About a Freediving Champion and Her Doomed Romance

This week on BOATS (Based On A True Story) Theatre is No Limit (now on Netflix), a French drama “inspired by” the life of Audrey Mestre, a record-setting freediver who – well, the events of her life are widely known but not that widely known, so we’ll save that for the movie. What you need to know going into it: freedivers compete to see who can hold their breath and go the deepest into the ocean. No scuba gear, just your lungs. Specifically, no-limit diving sees the diver holding onto a weighted sled attached to a line and plunging to a specified depth – well beyond 500 feet, if you’re going for the record – then using a propulsion tank to jet them back to the surface. It puts a lot of pressure on your physical and mental faculties, and makes for some reasonably intriguing drama, as we learn in this movie.

NO LIMIT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Roxana (Camille Rowe) learned to freedive from her grandfather. She’s a youngster when we meet her; she dives beneath the surface; hey, look, a sea turtle; and suddenly, she’s an adult. She sits in the lecture hall, listening to her prof bloviate in uberdramatic tones about the creatures that live in the deepest darkest deeps of the ocean, where the pressure is so intense, it’ll crush your lungs and you die immediately, that’s our time for today, have a nice week! Roxana spies a flier for a freediving course taught by record-setting diver Pascal Gauthier (Sofiane Zermani), gets in an argument with her mother (Roxana’s been skipping therapy), and trucks to the beach for the course.

She meets one of the instructors, Tom (Cesar Domboy), who’s a nice guy, and there’s a bit of a spark between them. On the boat, Pascal makes quite the shirtless entrance – no lack of confidence there, on any front. Tom invites Roxana to dinner with Pascal and the crew, and Pascal sits across the table and bores holes in her with his stare and gives off the type of skeezy vibe that makes you wonder if we should chum his underpants and find the nearest shark frenzy. She goes to the ladies’ room and he follows her in and hey now how about that, a few minutes later, the woman he came to the party with storms off in a huff.

Pascal invites Roxana to come with the team for their next excursion, and leaves it to his grizzled coach Stephane (Laurent Fernandez) to tell her that Pascal is training for a world-record 172-meter dive today. No biggie! He pulls it off, but tragedy strikes one of his safety divers doesn’t surface. They pull the guy out and Roxane performs CPR but it’s too late. Which means there’s a job opening on the team, and Roxana is in, despite her inexperience. She’s gone diving with Pascal, see, and he knows she’s gifted – she can hold her breath and remain calm and understands the economy of movement necessary to be a great freediver.

It doesn’t take long for Roxana to quit college and go on the road throughout Europe with Pascal for competitions, first as part of the team, and then to compete herself. Pascal seems a little jealous, and then seems even more jealous when he starts blacking out during dives and can no longer compete. He shifts to coaching Roxane, who rockets to freediving notoriety. She breaks a record for a swim-fin dive. She’s called a sex symbol. She’s in the throes of ecstasy with Pascal one night when he puts his hand around her throat and squeezes a little. She’s not into it. Maybe it’s not too late to procure some chum and a boat ride.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Shuffle the scripts for Into the Blue, The Big Blue, Enough and – I dunno, what’s a movie about an obscure sport? Balls of Fury? Dodgeball? Yeah, Dodgeball – Dodgeball, and you’ll get a rough approximation of No Limit.

Performance Worth Watching: Rowe gives an empathetic performance as Roxana, despite the screenplay giving her little more than a wisp of a character to work with.

Memorable Dialogue: Stephane boosts Roxane’s confidence: “Roxy. You don’t need him. You don’t need anybody.”

Sex and Skin: A few medium-hard-R-rated sex scenes, each more steamy and graphic than before.

Our Take: No Limit mirrors some of the broad strokes of Mestre’s life, which had its share of – how do I say this without spoiling anything – ambiguities. Those ambiguities draw fascination to a movie that’s otherwise tedious, maudlin in tone and populated by flimsy characters. There’s little sense of Roxana’s passion for the sport, her ambition or her love for Pascal, who projects his true, ugly, megalomaniac self up there for everyone to see like Bat-Signal. Our two leads each get one confessional monologue, and multiple scenes in which they plunge into the ocean’s inky blackness – so many, including multiple dream sequences, that their repetition becomes wearisome, and almost comical.

That isn’t to say such imagery isn’t poetic. The muffled stillness and vast, open spaces can inspire awe, wonder, fear and introspection. But writer-director David M. Rosenthal’s proclivity for dramatic underwater photography and semi-torrid sex scenes can’t compensate for the movie’s languid pace and dramatic impotence. It often looks beautiful, but is a long, slow descent into mostly empty waters.

Our Call: SKIP IT. No Limit exists in a nowhere-zone between sports drama and doomed romance.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.