| 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 |