BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

d. Jasmin Dizdar (1999)

Now available on video

“You’re English. Never forget that”. So one English football hooligan tells another in Beautiful People, a movie about the day-to-day travails of an assortment of Bosnian refugees in London but which has a few corrosively pertinent things to say about nationalism of any stripe. While English football hooligans play at refighting old battles in the pubs and in the stands, entire nationalities do the same thing for real in vicious wars. It’s the same myopic hatred, just on an immensely larger scale.

The Balkans have provided tragically fertile soil for filmmakers in recent years. Beautiful People, a British film by a Bosnian director, is partly a black comedy but also a poignantly knowing portrait of refugees in a country whose attitude to them is deeply ambivalent. They are a dislocated underclass, housed in council flats if at all, let adrift in a strange place, hampered by language barriers in gaining access to services such as health, patronised by the complacent upper class, kept at arm’s length by mealy-mouthed politicians and regarded by established immigrant communities as a threat to already dwindling resources. To the racist white unemployed, they are to be scorned, blamed and resented. Problems at home, problems abroad.

Several stories are skillfully tracked. Refugees encounter an indifferent Britain; Londoners encounter a distant and unwanted war. Idealism collides with pragmatism. An idealistic young medico falls in love with a handsome refugee at her NHS clinic, to the distaste of her snobbish Establishment family; when she takes him home, one of them says cluelessly “personally, I’m very much against ethnic cleansing” while another holds up the historical fact that the English Civil War was 400 years ago as some kind of lesson. A young husband and his wife, raped by Serbs in the war, seek an abortion from a weary English doctor on the edge, himself battling an ex-wife for custody of his own kids. A middle-aged Croat and Serb get into a name-calling brawl on a London bus and pursue their rather farcical vendetta even into the hospital ward they end up sharing with a curmudgeonly Welshman; and a paralytically hungover English soccer hooligan named Griffin wakes up in wartorn Bosnia without a clue how he came to be there.

Beautiful People’s humanism brings an appealing warmth. When Griffin is awoken by starving Bosnian peasants poking at him, it’s boisterous black humour; but when he stumbles uncomprehendingly through a UN field hospital, farce is mixed with tragedy. He volunteers his stash of heroin to anaesthetise a bloody amputation, his first ever act of true selflessness. It’s a moving sequence upon which the movie and indeed the whole of Griffin’s life hinges -- when he returns home Griffin is no longer a mindlessly xenophobic football hooligan. The Bosnian husband and wife are slowly persuaded by the weary English doctor’s benign humanity that they cannot visit the prejudices of the past on an unborn, blameless child. The grumpy, hostile Welshman in the hospital ward - product of a culture repressed for centuries by the English - makes the Serb and the Croat put aside their animosities, or at least compel them to understand that they aren’t the only peoples with a bone to pick.

Their stories are realistic and humanely told, and engagingly small-scale even if the issues are not. If I have one criticism of Beautiful People, it’s that the resolution of the various stories is a little too schematic, a little too neat, and the story of the BBC war correspondent grappling with post-traumatic stress syndrome is not quite convincing. On the whole, Beautiful People blends black humour and humanist concern to bring empathy and a sense of hope. The concluding scenes - video footage of a happy wedding day in Bosnia before savage animosities overwhelmed it - are a bitter-sweet echo of the weary English doctor’s advice to the young pregnant Bosnian bride: “If life works out just a tiny little bit in your favour, it can be beautiful”. Words of a sadder and wiser man.

Reviewed by David Bolton