When
Beautiful People begins, a Croat (Faruk Prutti)
and a Serb (Dado Jehan) start a fight on a London bus in October
1993 during the height of the Bosnian War, when refugees are
arriving with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Soon, we observe
episodes of violence breaking out everywhere, and we wonder
why we are still viewing one impossible interpersonal encounter
after another rather than leaving the cinema disgusted long
before the end of the surreal film, which has been edited
so that one episode follows another so quickly (short-cut
style) that the screen is constantly full of surprises and
ultimately frivolity, though the West LA moviehouse where
I went was uncomfortably silent at the black humor. The two
fistfighters, for example, end up in the hospital alongside
one another and a third patient, from Wales, who in turn wants
a different room, but their nurse insists on order. A former
Yugoslavian basketball player Pero (played by Edin Dzandzanovic)
is struck by a car and taken to a hospital, and a nurse, Portia
(played by Charlotte Coleman), falls in love with him, and
takes him home to meet her stuffy parents, who quickly conclude
that he is uncouth. Doctor Mouldy (played by Nicholas Farrell),
while coping with an imminent divorce that will cause him
to lose custody of his children, learns that a pregnant woman
wants to abort an imminent birth because she was raped before
leaving Bosnia with her husband. Recent high school graduate
but unemployed Griffin Midge (played by Danny Nussbaum) rebels
against his unsupportive father by using his allowance on
heroin; while under a drug-induced stupor, he goes to the
airport to fly to Amsterdam to replenish his supply of drugs,
only to fall asleep in a freight bin that is bound for Bosnia
with food; when he awakens, he is on the ground with UN officials
who are trying to provide relief to those without food or
medicine. A BBC correspondent (played by Gilbert Martin) goes
to Bosnia to "make people give a shit," but when he returns,
he refuses to give up his tapes because he is suffering from
"Bosnia syndrome," which a psychologist at one point informs
us is an empathy for victims so profound that those who help
the Bosnians imagine themselves also as victims. Directed
by and written by Jasmin Dizdar, a refugee from the former
Yugoslavia, the film shows the senselessness of violence,
hardly a new thought, but more importantly portrays subtle
changes as the characters overcome stereotypic prejudices
to recognize the human qualities in others. At the end, everyone
is at peace. The hospital patients end up playing cards together
with the nurse. The basketball player charms the family by
playing on the piano and marries the nurse. Dr. Mouldy, now
living alone, invites the husband, wife, and newborn baby
to live with him in his London flat. Griffin, meanwhile, uses
his remaining supply of heroin to aid a man undergoing amputation,
and returns home with a blind orphan, only to empathize so
deeply with the amputee that he manifests the "Bosnia syndrome"
by placing his leg on a railroad rail until shooed away by
a railway security guard. The BBC correspondent gives up his
tapes of Bosnia, which make Griffin a Warholian hero. As Dr.
Mouldy puts it, "It doesn't take much to make life beautiful."
Thus, beautiful people, caught up in an ugly war, found redemption
and brought joy to increasingly multiethnic England. MH
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