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.
