Beautiful People Movie Review

It seems like eight years after Short Cuts, everyone decided to try to one-up Robert Altman’s slow-moving masterpiece. In the space of six months, we have seen the releases of three films that have been Short Cuts-esque. First we had Magnolia. Then we had the beautifully photographed yet sluggish 1999 Madeleine. Now we have Beautiful People, a British film about Bosnia.

Somehow packing in the stories of about a dozen major characters into a two-hour running time, Beautiful People has the same bizarre intertwining of characters that Magnolia and Short Cuts did. However, Beautiful People manages to hit harder when all is said and done.

Beautiful People is the story of Portia (Charlotte Coleman), an upper crust Brit ER doctor who falls in love with Pero (Edin Dzandzanovic), a Bosnia immigrant. Pero ended up in the hospital when he was hit by a car, and he ends up right next to a Serb and a Croat (Frank Purti and Dado Jehan) who have duked it out all throughout London. Next to the Serb and the Croat is a Welsh firebomber (Nicholas McGaughey) who is in the ward with a burn wound. Overseeing those three misanthropes is a nurse (Linda Bassett).

In the same hospital, on a different floor, there is an obstetrics doctor ho oversees a Muslim woman who was raped in Bosnia and now wants an abortion so that she does not give birth to a child of the enemy. This doctor is engaged in a custody battle. His children attend school with the children of a BBC cameraman who is stationed in Bosnia. The headmaster of the school deals with a heroin-addicted son who accidentally is airdropped into Bosnia when he falls asleep on an airdrop package.

Much more jumbled than the last British film to probe the world of Bosnia (Welcome to Sarajevo), Beautiful People plays itself out so neatly as to be of absolutely no trouble for the viewer to follow once you are in the thick of it. Writer-director Jasmin Dizdar, himself a Bosnia refugee, manages to add a personal touch to the story that Welcome to Sarajevo was missing.

Unlike Short Cuts or Magnolia, Beautiful People never delivers a monologue. Instead, it sometimes ends up being peachy and drives its point home like a shot through the heart. Which, when dealing with Bosnia, might not exactly be a bad idea.



Beautiful... people?