A Day at the Beach

It's amazing to have finally seen this lost film. Poor Mark Burns died this year without ever having seen the finished film! Why was it lost? It's quite good but I can understand that even if this film had a normal release in cinemas it would not have been a hit. It's too sad and tragic. The performances are great, tho. Mark Burns plays a sensitive soul who loves his daughter but loves his drink a little bit more. Beatie Edney is amazing. One of the best child performances I've seen. It's fantastic to see that she grew up to be an even greater actress as an adult. She was in a chilling part in the TV series Prime Suspect.

It's also nice to see the Danish beach where "A Day" was filmed and also to see the great Bergman actress Eva Dahlbeck in the small role of a café owner.

Being a great fan of European cinema in the early 60s, I loved Polanski's, Knife in the Water, Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac but was initially very disappointed with the full on colour film, Rosemary's Baby. Having now seen the most impressive A Day At The Beach which should have been released before Rosemary's Baby, I would certainly have been happier back then if the order of release had not been so drastically changed by circumstances. This great little film is much more akin to the director's early b/w features, although this is in colour, and is bleak indeed. Seemingly shot in a single day in the pouring rain on some desolate Danish beach we spend some time with a little girl and her 'uncle' who spends most of the time trying to get another drink. Despicable, though the lead often appears, there is an palpable bond between the two and it is quite startling that when others try to relate to the child, our hero seems peerless. Fascinating, dark and with a brilliant performance from the young girl, this also has some surprisingly horrific sequences (not counting the true horror of Graham Stark as some horrible underling of a gay Peter sellers!). Well worth searching out.

I recently had a look at the comments about this film. I am rather amazed that all of them attribute this movie to Roman Polanski. As IMDb writes it, this movie was directed by Simon Hesera, my late brother, and not Roman Polanski. It was his first major feature movie, saluted as a masterpiece by movie critics or other directors (such as Michelangelo Antonioni). Time has gone by, and for some unknown reason, in spite of the fact that Polanski is only mentioned as the one who adapted the story to the screen, the name of the director was skipped and the movie added to Polanski's curriculum. I was 17 years old and remember well the time when this film was made. Polanski, Peter Sellers and my late brother were all good friends and the movie was made "between friends". The story goes that my brother was given, with this sad movie and its tragic subject, a difficult first chance at directing a movie. Had he been given another subject, happier, funnier or more commercial, he would have made a hit and started a popular career as director, no less than Polanski's, who recognized my brother's genius.

Special in many ways before you even start watching, this miniature is not desperate to be liked and is in fact rather admirable for its commitment to being unlovely.

If you're wondering where they're going with this, then you may be disappointed; it is a snapshot of the miserable lives that play out in plain site when you truly don't care about anything but forgetting.

Often painful but not quite excruciating, this vision of a man living a day as if it might truly be his last in freedom though he seems anything but free in practice.

An exorcise in the pretentiousness of vulgar people always accompanied by a fairly agreeable child star.

Polanski seems like he can do no wrong in his writing of this.

Ironically, while Roman Polanski was in Europe the same year The Manson Family would violently crash Sharon Tate's party, he was preparing for two movies with the word DAY in the title: scouting to direct THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN while adapting an obscure Dutch novel for A DAY AT THE BEACH, a film so independent it feels like something more of the John Cassavates wheelhouse...

And this BEACH centers on a raving drunken British man's beeline trek through a mostly barren Danish beach tourist town during sporadic rain bursts, and instead of tourists are an abandoned lot of outdoor and indoor cafe or curio shop or liquor store or pub owners wherein he gets more intoxicated and thus more pontificating and moody along the way, mostly trying for as much drink for as little money possible: a kind of progressively-blasted human coupon...

The primary twist is he's not alone... Tagging along is his niece who's really his daughter from surly starting point ex Fiona Lewis, and while future HIGHLANDER beauty Beatie Edney is a good enough child actress, providing both realistic screaming tantrums and gaping toothless grins whenever needed, her mere existence is to underline just how flaky, downright selfish and dangerously neglectful Mark Burns's Bernie's traipsing-around plight really is...

For example, in one scene he's being hit-on by an openly gay/super effeminate storefront couple... one played capably by Peter Sellers billed as A. Queen; at the same time, right outside, little Winnie gets stuck in some netting along the beach's planked walkway... a path that winds through the sand in a location that's even more art-house from the incessant tempest...

It's never entirely clear what the actual plot or purpose is, but Burns's character is a terrific drunk that'd make Charles Bukowski envy with a mobile, existential life all mapped out, at one point telling a pretentious (passed-out) poet's sexy wife, "I'll be hungover tomorrow, but the next day meet me at noon at..."

As this lost-for-decades curio is, by the end, a dizzying odyssey by first time director Simon Hesera and, while frowned upon by writer/producer Polanski for lack of proper composition, it's through a rip-roaring drunkard's eyes that we're eyeing everything, so in actuality the location is more what the character experiences than the audience visualizes.