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| Leonardo
DiCaprio, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet, Sally Potter, Robert Carlyle |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Françoise
(Virginie Ledoyen): Richard, this is just the kind of pretentious
bullshit that Americans always say to French girls so they can sleep
with them.
An
American backpacker is given a map to a mysterious tropical island beach
where a secret commune of travellers lives in secret.
 This
highly anticipated production was surrounded by negative publicity as
it reputedly laid waste to the tropical island where much of the action
takes place. Rather ironic for a film that attempts to celebrate the
beauty and temptations of unspoilt natural surroundings. Ultimately
however, the picture fails to do little else than present a succession
of pretty but rather uninvolving shots of jungles, waterfalls and beaches.
Part of the problem lies with the premise of the film, that presents
a hedonistic enclave of drop-out backpackers as the ultimate good time.
The audience is well ahead of the film every step of the way, as breathtakingly
unsubtle hints of doom are heavy-handedly piled up before us.
But most of the problem stems from DiCaprio's performance. He does very
little more than posing, a vacant look in his eyes as he mumbles about
looking for 'something new' in a voice-over narration that is more than
a few notches below Ewan McGregor's irresistible rants in director Boyle's
Trainspotting. By the time he starts to follow, Shining-like,
in the footsteps of his obvious commune predecessor Daffy (an odd cameo
from Robert Carlyle), we have lost what little grip we had on his character
and are reduced to dumbly gazing at the screen as one inexplicable event
follows another. The stylistic low point of the film sees DiCaprio changing
into a computer arcade game character running around to the beat of
a techno drone. If this is supposed to be cutting-edge contemporary
mainstream cinema, then I give up... |
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Identical releases are available for Region
1 and Region 2.
The
anamorphic widescreen image is framed at 2.35:1. Usually outstanding
cinematographer Darius Khondji's work this time is somewhat uninspired,
but his images are rendered sharply and clearly in an excellent transfer
without any visual noise or traces of compression artifacts.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix gives the techno music score plenty
of space to fool around in. Initially impressive, the rather monotonous
sound design quickly grows tiresome.
The
Beach
may not have done as well as expected at the box office, that was still
no obstacle to producing a nicely feature-packed DVD Special Edition
for the movie's fans. A running audio commentary from director Danny
Boyle proves to be fairly entertaining and informative, but fails to
shed much light on the film's problems and the controversy surrounding
it. Some of the most baffling plot twists are mentioned but hardly clarified:
the reason why Richard leaves behind a copy of the map for instance
seems to puzzle Boyle as much as it stumped this reviewer, but he doesn't
manage to muster much more of an elucidation than 'there wouldn't really
have been a movie if he hadn't left it behind'.
A Deleted Scenes section holds an alternative opening as well as an
alternative ending for the film, and quite a few scenes that are fun
to watch but were cut due to time constraints. They can be watched with
or without director's commentary in the form of subtitles. There is
also a series of storyboards for various scenes from the movie, with
a very detailed, comic-book style design and very illuminating to browse
through. A selection of theatrical and TV trailers is also available,
as is a music video from the group All Saints. The
animated menu screens are made up of layered static images of characters
and moments from the movie, that move across each other to bring you to
the next screen. This is all very nicely done and is accompanied by cues
from the score.
Dan Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on The
Beach .
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to return to the front page.
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