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Not wanting to sign off without making at least one unqualified recommendation, I capped the otherwise unremarkable week with a last-minute search of the video shelves and found this interesting new British release. The first film from Bosnian writer/director Jasmin Dizdar, it juxtaposes the lives of several London residents whose paths cross and interweave in October 1993. As refugees arrive from the worsening Balkan war and soccer hooliganism breaks out to coincide with the World Cup in Rotterdam, the dozen or so characters we meet respond to the influx with varying degrees of both compassion and xenophobia: a brawling Serb and Croat wind up hospitalized with to an amateur Welsh terrorist; a Yugoslav ex-soldier, now basketball- and piano-player, has a freak accident while seeking the literal meaning of “L-I-F-E” and falls in love with the daughter of a conservative Minister of Parliament; a heroine-addicted footballer takes a wrong turn at the airport, and winds up in Bosnia giving comfort to a blinded boy; a doctor in the throes of marital separation must dissuade a refugee couple from killing their unwanted newborn daughter named Chaos (which isn’t so strange a moniker when the president of their now non-existent country is named Panic); and a wounded BBC combat videographer comes home from the battlefield with a strange compulsion fueled by the insanity of war.
Dizdar’s film, which casts fairly well-known British actors (Charlotte Coleman from Four Weddings and a Funeral, Gilbert Martin from Rob Roy, Steve Sweeney from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) next to several Bosnians making their first film appearances, isn’t exactly what you’d call a comedy. The director describes himself as having “a sense of humor so black it’s almost intolerable,” but I didn’t find that to be quite the case. Though often absurd, his opus is more uplifting, and surprisingly gentle; any film with the line “if life works out just one tiny bit in your favor, it can be beautiful,” couldn’t be too dark. Whatever, it was deemed good enough to be worthy of a special award at Cannes last year. Assimilating the multitude of characters in Beautiful People takes time and careful viewing, but the reward is a laughing-through-the-tears experience such as is rarely seen in mainstream Hollywood fare. B
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