Each Day, A Film
January 20th 2012 (Retrospective)
If there's been a certain nostalgic tone to these past updates, it's because I've been talking about films that - for whatever reason - I love, and because of that I've strayed from the original brief, which was to actually watch a film a day then write about it. However, circumstances have precluded this, although out of the recent updates I did actually watch Plunkett and Macleane, but apart from that the majority of these retrospectives have been films I've got mentally stored in a happy place.
While circumstances were precluding doing this exercise, though, I did actually go through and watch several films as a blast-from-the-past exercise, so I figure it's probably worth talking about them, mais non?
Alex Garland's The Beach was, for a while, a dip book for me - one of two, basically, where I could start reading at any point and feel comfortable, the other being Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It helped that for about three years after the film was released you could find a copy in any charity shop you went into, to the point where it became kind of a standing personal joke.
There was even a copy at an old workplace of mine, where people brought in their old books for the lunch area in case you wanted something to read, which was a little strange as it tended to stand out around all the Mills and Boon and Daphne Du Maurier - but it was kind of handy to have around.
In a couple of previous posts, I mentioned that the first quasi-independent access to a cinema I had was through a friend-of-the-family - you know the sort, where you've known each other your whole life but it's not exactly a friendship, more like an inescapable, occasionally annoying kinship. He was - and most likely is - a good, if slightly banal person (and if that sounds like a criticism, it isn't - if I was a more banal person, I'd most likely have a job and a 'normal life' instead of retroactively updating a film blog nobody reads) but, most importantly, he had a car.
It wasn't a great car. Hell, it wasn't even a good car, because he was a teenager, and I suspect the expectation was that he'd crash it, which, as far as I can tell, he didn't. But it was a car - in bold type no less, because it meant that, as long as I was on his good side, we could go and see films in an eastward town about half an hour away. As mentioned before, we got to see Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels when - shock and indeed horror - I was still a year underage, and a few other films as well, none of which particularly stick in the memory - except for The Beach.
Except that this can't be right, because the film came out in 2000, by which time I was in London and he was in Exeter. This, kids, is what we call a misformed or misplaced memory, and sadly enough it's not even drug-induced.
This is a slightly strange moment for me, fact fans, because my memory is telling me I've seen The Beach in the cinema, but it can't tell me where. It wasn't in the Eastward Town, because my friend had gone by then, and it wasn't in East London, because the only two films I saw during my time there were The World is Not Enough and A Clockwork Orange - along with a trip out to Docklands, for some reason, to see Man in the Moon. (That was another Friend-with-Car escapade, in case you were wondering. Before I could drive, friends-with-cars were all kinds of gods, frankly.)
So to backtrack; I must have seen the film at some point, and it's most likely it was while I was back at home and my friend was too, but I cannot place it, and if this is the start of early-onset-Alzheimers, folks, it's not pretty. So let's move on.
I would have seen it later, on video, between 2000 and 2001 because the Friend from the previous Plunkett and Macleane entry had a killer video library, frankly. Unfortunately, the period between approximately May 2000 and August 2001 is pretty much a blur for me thanks to a combination of circumstance and other matters, so I can't say for sure what I did during that period other than avoid doing academic work and watch a lot of Angel, but I'm sure there were a lot of films, too, and The Beach could quite likely have been one of them.
One thing I do know; the film has a killer soundtrack. Yes, yes, I know that some of you savants out there are protesting the following song:
But even for All Saints, it's still a good song. Now, the Amazon Monetizer has disappeared from Blogger for me for no apparent reason, but I can only entice you with my wiles to go and have a look at the soundtrack here. Seriously, for the time it was so cool it practically had icicles hanging off the CD case, and even the songs with cheeky samples from the film work, somehow. Even twelve years on, I could happily listen to this soundtrack in full right now.
The film itself is not actually that bad - granted, the six point+ score in IMBD is fairly accurate - but if you're going to complain about anything, complain about the fact that the script turns Richard into a ravenous fuckbadger, who instead of having an unrequited crush on Francoise actually wins her away from winsome Etiénne before pissing it up the wall by sleeping with Tilda Swinton for no apparent reason. This is the Nicholas Cage Can't Possibly Be A Virgin school of thought at work, because who could resist the winning charms of Leonardo DiCaprio? Nobody, that's who, and that's why he's not a frustrated Englishman anymore, instead turning into a phosphorescence-stirring sexual dynamo.
And that's the thing; underlying the novel, from memory, was a healthy vein of psychosis, fostered by Richard's feeling of somehow having "missed" the Vietnam war, which the films - for the most part - made look so cool. In the film, Richard does eventually go fairly deep into psychosis territory, but only when Sal forces him to live in isolation then rips apart his relationship with Francois while he's out there on his own. Then there's a brief, cheeky video-game section, and then it all goes to shit very quickly.
There's kind of a moral to the proceedings herein; I'd love to say that it's If a holiday destination drives Robert Carlyle psychotic, best leave it alone, but it's more along the lines of a general motto about human society; if a group gets too big, even by, say, three members, then a split is more or less inevitable, and not a pretty one at that.
Not that beach life pre-Dicaprio and his French tagalongs is necessarily the most adorable thing ever, but we're not shown that; we only know that sensory overload and possibly underlying psychological issues drove Robert Carlyle - one of the original three settlers of the beach, along with Tilda Swinton and a relatively forgettable Australian -
- Played by a Norwegian who studied drama in South Africa, fact fans -
- who styled themselves with cartoon character names in an odd kind of rebirth. So after that, you have to ask yourself, how does this work? Three people could conceivably live on fish and the occasional bit of fruit, but as the camp started expanding, things started getting more difficult, and suddenly people are treating Sal like a leader and Bugs - well, like the leader's sexbuddy - and all of a sudden, you have a community, living under the constant shadow of a giant cannabis growing operation staffed by Thais with a nominal grasp of English but a firm grasp of weapons.
How could this possibly go wrong?
That's why I actually like the film more than it should really be liked; in a way, it's a DiCaprio vehicle and it was something for Danny Boyle to do, but at the same time it doesn't try to make out that this fantastic secret beach community is filled with anything other than humans - poor, fallible, cricket-misunderstanding humans, who don't know how to deal with shark attack victims or the incursive threat of the possibility of more people coming and turning their pleasant beachfront community into a commercial proposition, and it all comes to a climax when Sal is willing to kill to keep the community together, seemingly not realising that that killing will drive them all apart - even though they're already done, really, and ready for the raft.
Even if I can't remember exactly when I saw it for the first time, I made the time to watch it last week during Circumstances Intervening, and I still like the film even now.
But even more, I love the soundtrack.
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