In February 2000, Peter Bradshaw, British cinema critic wrote in The Guardian, "The release of The Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio confirms the worrying emergence of the six-pack tyranny in modern American cinema." Three years after Titanic, the actor was at the (ever-rising) crest of Hollywood hysteria, moving the public with What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Total Eclipse and Romeo & Juliet. Leo was pretty untouchable. In a recent interview with The Independent, Danny Boyle revealed that the film would soon see its prequel come to being, with Amy Seimetz behind the script, marking 20 years since the films release. What's more, Steven Soderbergh could well head the project. In anticipation, we're asking why The Beach was such a success.
The film's genesis
To adapt Alex Garland's best-selling novel to the big screen, Danny Boyle called on his Trainspotting team: Andrew Macdonald in charge of production and John Hodge on the script. The film tells the story of Richard (DiCaprio), an American tourist in Thailand with an itch for adventure. Meeting over-seasoned stock traveler figure Daffy, Richard quickly becomes obsessed with the perfect beach, a tropical paradise home to an isolated community that survive on a diet of love and weed. En route, he meets Françoise and Etienne, a young French couple who follow him to the beach. Inevitably, hedonism is too potent a drug and the cracks begin to show, in reality as on screen. Phi Phi Le, the small island near Plunket where the film was shot has been indefinitely closed after hoards of tourists flooded the beach in search of their own paradise, irreparably damaging its ecosystem.
The cast
It requires a little boldness to bring Leonardo DiCaprio on-screen alongside the arguably more classic Tilda Swinton. But Danny Boyle has a way of organizing his castings: on the spread of images he gathered as a sort of "mood board", a photograph of Virginie Ledoyen sits next to Guillaume Canet, the pair still relatively unknown in the US. It was this this somewhat motley cast that added another feather to the film's bow.
The soundtrack
The soundtrack to The Beach blended an eerie pop cocktail of ambient classics and more jarring original compositions but it remains undeniably classic. All Saints's Pure Shores anchored the film firmly in popular culture. Angelo Badalamenti, the composer behind the soundtrack for Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks gave the picture its anxiety-inducing edge, with techno tracks like Beached making the island all the more eery.
The myth of the lost island
It's what galvanizes The Beach as a tour-de-force of pop-cinema. The lost desert island has long been the fantasy of explorers, writers and mere mortals. On the white sands of Phi Phi L, where the film crew was sure to add a few hundred palm trees, the three starry-eyed travelers see the possibility of self-reinvention and a new vision of society. But even total freedom has its limits.
Translated by Ashe de Sousa
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