Herald rating: * * * *
Cast: Charlotte Coleman, Charles Kay, Rosalind Ayres, Nicholas Farrell, Faruk Pruti, Dado Jehan.
Director: Jasmin Dizdar.
Running time: 107 mins.
Rating: M.
Screening: Rialto cinemas.
Review: Peter Calder
Coincidence, all the more pungent for being improbable, is the dramatic mainspring of this exuberant political allegory, the feature debut of a Bosnian-born Londoner.
From the opening scene when a Croat and a Serb - erstwhile neighbours who were enemies at home - spot each other on a bus and begin an uncivil war of their own, the film juggles black comedy and heart-rending pathos as it surveys the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia from the middle of England's capital.
Dizdar introduces with economy and precision a disparate cast and interweaves their stories as he works towards a resoundingly satisfying climax. It seems a bit cluttered at times. Some characters edge close to stereotype and the details can be loose (one character doesn't understand the English word "life" yet has no trouble with "suffocate").
But these are minor blemishes in an accomplished, vigorous film. The title is clearly intended ironically, but not the way Mike Leigh's Thatcher-era titles Life Is Sweet or High Hopes were. We may disagree, but Dizdar clearly thinks these people are beautiful - and hopes that one day they will think so too.
His apparently endless dramatis personae include a snobbish MP's family whose medical student daughter falls for a Bosnian immigrant; the lager-lout son of a stiff-upper-lipped schoolteacher; a stressed hospital doctor, shattered both by his wife's leaving and by the pleas of a Bosnian refugee patient that he terminate her advanced pregnancy because her child was fathered in a gang-rape by Serbian soldiers; and a famous television correspondent shellshocked from his tour of duty in Bosnia.
Dizdar, who has lived in London since 1989, is hugely inventive in the composition of a storyline which veers without warning from dire drama to surrealistic comedy.
The film's subtext is similarly textured, inviting us to be filled with righteous rage at the way political zealotry cripples individual lives.
Beautiful People
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