Synopsis

Secret paradise that never was for the jaded...by

The Straits Times Interactive - Life! of Singapore...

A young man finds his heaven on a beach, but all is not idyllic

THE BEACH, based on the maiden novel of British author Alex Garland, is a moral tale of how the idea of paradise can be a double-edged sword.

It tells the story of Richard, a young backpacker who, restless from the lack of real tangible emotions in his modern world of the Internet, television and video games, goes in search of adventure in Thailand.

Travel, he says, is the search for experience, the quest for something different.

In Bangkok, Richard meets Daffy, an ageing disillusioned hippie who tells him about a glorious beach on a secret island, the paradise on Earth which Richard has been looking for.

The next day, he finds a hand-drawn map of the island pinned to the door of his hotel room, a gift from a heartbroken Daffy just before the older man takes his life.

Richard persuades two French travellers -- Etienne and his girlfriend, Francoise, whom Richard covets -- to join him in his search for the secret beach.

What follows is a tropical adventure as the trio brave a dangerous swim across open seas, a frantic escape from armed drug lords and a terrifying leap off a waterfall to find their paradise.

There, they discover a small community of like-minded travellers who welcome them into their commune, bonded together by an unwritten social contract: To keep their beach a secret forever.

But Richard has already given away a copy of the map to two American backpackers. It is a secret he has to keep from his new friends and is more than willing to forget.

Trouble rears its head when the young Americans start on their own trail to the beach, guided by the very same map given to them by Richard.

What follows is a tense endeavour to keep the intruders at bay while maintaining the harmony among the beach-dwellers, which has become frayed by rivalry and a series of tragic events.

The movie departs from the book in several respects.

Richard, who is the quintessential emotionally-repressed Brit in the novel, becomes a risk-taking American in the movie.

And while Richard's desire for Francoise was never realised in the book, the French girl, played by actress Virginie Ledoyen, dumps Etienne in the movie for her American admirer.

Finally, in an unexpected twist, Richard and Sal, the commune's leader, become lovers in the movie. This makes their relationship much more complex than it was in the book.

Director Danny Boyle says Richard, as depicted in the book, was a very passive character.

"We decided when we did the movie that we wanted this character to be much more active, much more dynamic," he says.

"It was a good decision because then things spin off from it and we began to realise that this is a part of Richard's character. He becomes almost aggressive in what he wants to get and it makes his character darker."

Copyright © 1999 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.

From PEANUT80

Baby Boomers thought war was a John Wayne movie..

Rich watches Platoon, etc and yearns to have had the Vietnam experience....loves to play war games...

Baby Boomers exit Nam on top a roof, under gun fire, as the city collapses around them...

Rich exits the Beach as the community erupts, fires blaze, and the Beach life collapses around him...

To me, it is the meeting of the Love Children of the 70's with their offspring Generation X at the Beach. There, the circle becomes complete, as it did once over twenty years ago...in Nam....

The father begets the child....Daffy begot Rich....the idealogy of the 70's...is reborn in the 90's .... meeting its maker..same place..

Garland is Generation X--to me he is not only asking the viewer to take a hard look at Generation X, but also from where they sprang...they are the offspring of the 70's Love Generation--Hippies......So if we are to find fault with them, we must examine where the seed first took root...where it was housed /nutured..

"For a while we were untouchable in our happiness"..

"I thought we'd have to talk about our positive energies a lot, kiss the earth every morning and recycle our waste products by some unspeakable mechanism. Fortunately not, it really was some kind of paradise!"