When
Americans are tourists abroad, what do they do? Learn about
another culture or have fun together? In Brokedown
Palace (1999), two Ohio teenage girls are not
interested in Bangkok, check into a sleezy hotel, sneak into
the pool at a five-star hotel, get caught possessing dope,
and end up in to jail. In this year's The Beach,
Richard (played by Leonardo diCaprio) is bored with Bangkok's
massive golden Reclining Buddha, is turned off by the commercial
aspects of the tourist part of town, finds Westerners in five-star
hotels watching a rerun of the 1979 film Apocalypse
Now, and instead seeks adventure. Directed by Danny
Boyle and based on the novel by Alex Garland, The Beach
is a tale of a teenager who tries to find himself by meeting
a challenge. The first challenge, to drink snake blood, is
over quickly. The more enduring challenge is presented in
the form of a map of an idyllic island (actually, Ko Phi Phi
Leh in the Gulf of Siam), inaccessible to ordinary tourists.
The map is attached to the door of Richard's room of his cheap
hotel by "Daffy Duck" (played by Robert Carlyle), a crazed
Westerner, before he commits suicide. He then persuades two
French tourists, Françoise and Étienne (played by Virginie
Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet), who enjoy having sex with each
other, to go to the island. On the way, they pass through
Thai beach resorts filled with decadent Westerners who swim,
smoke dope, drink booze, and otherwise appear to be funloving
members of the pampered middle class, and Richard gives a
copy of the map to two guys who befriend him (evidently at
Phuket). When they reach as far as Thai transportation will
take them, they swim to the island, arriving near a marijuana
field guarded by armed Thai drug lords. After evading capture
and possible death, they go inland and find a commune of Westerners
around a pristine lagoon led by Sal (played by Tilda Swinton),
who proposes the key decisions and then secures unanimous
consent from the rest. The rest of the story focuses on how
the commune operates. The Thais have allowed them to live
on an isolated part of the island for about six years on the
condition that the population will remain small so that their
fields will be kept a secret from the authorities. Richard,
Françoise, and Étienne are allowed to stay in the commune,
where everyone performs a useful task to make the community
self-sufficient. Richard shows his skill at spearfishing,
kills a small shark in the lagoon, displaces Étienne as the
lover of Françoise, and accompanies and sleeps with Sal on
a shopping trip to a nearby tourist island to exchange marijuana
for rice, tampons, size AAA batteries, and the other consumerist
needs that members of the commune have not shaken. In one
of many voice-overs, Richard confides "I found my vocation--the
pursuit of pleasure." But, as the tagline of the film proclaims,
"Innocence never lasts forever." When the two guys use the
map to arrive on the secret island with girlfriends, Sal bans
Richard to the highlands to watch the four until he can get
the map from them, and his sanity slips away. When the four
newcomers walk down the paths of the marijuana field, the
Thais shoot them. Since the arrival of more outsiders violates
the agreement with the Westerners on the island, the Thais
go to the commune to order them to leave and "Forget about
Thailand." After the tense encounter, Sal decides to stay
and die, Richard stops the breathing of a Swede who was slowly
dying of a shark attack, the group departs on a Titanic-type
raft, and the adventure ends in a cybercafe, where Richard
accesses e-mail from his parents and Étienne, who attaches
a photograph of a happy scene of all the members of the commune.
The Beach, in short, shows that the X Generation
of Westerners are tired of democracy, individualism, and materialism,
but revel in mindless hedonism, with parallels to Apocalypse
Now. Unlike Brokedown
Palace, the Thai government approved the filming,
which shows that beach resort tourists are the latest to exploit
Thailand's physical beauty without considering that they have
a lot to learn from the serenity of its culture. Indeed, there
was so much rearranging of the flora of the island that Thai
environmentalists protested during the filming of The
Beach, a fact denied to the public by the news media
in Los Angeles. MH
I
want to comment on this film
