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Beautiful
People   |
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Director
Jasmin Dizdar Stars Charlotte Coleman, Nicholas Farrell, Danny Nussbaum, Siobhan Redmond, Edin Dzandzanovic Certificate Running time 107 mins Made UK 1999 CONSTRUCTED in the fashionable soap operatic style where the narrative follows a series of disparate stories, that may or may not converge, Bosnian writer/director, Jasmin Dizdar, has made an uplifting fable about peace and reconciliation. The timing is perfect. Just when everyone has grown exhausted by ethnic cleansing and its aftermath, all that's required now is a little love and understanding. A Serb and a Croat beat each other to pulp in the streets of London and find themselves in adjacent hospital beds in a room with a belligerent Welsh Nationalist. Another Serb is run over by a car and falls in love with the trainee doctor who happens to be the daughter of a prominent Tory MP. Another doctor struggles to get his two boys to school on time, after his wife has walked out. A junkie football hooligan and his vicious mates mug a black man in an alley and steal money to fly them to Holland to see England fail to qualify for the World Cup. A young Bosnian couple want their unborn baby killed, because the wife had been raped by Serbian soldiers. A BBC cameraman returns from the war zone and tries to pick up the pieces of a fractuous marriage, while effectively having a nervous breakdown. Dizdar's London is full of stressed, unhappy people, kicking against the pricks. The trainee doctor's family is stereotypical yah-yah patronising upper-class, while the hooligan's mum and dad are the lower-middle equivalent, reactionary and powerless. NHS nurses are saints and good deeds are rewarded. The trick is to introduce bad things in a selection of appalling situations and let them work it through, so that by the end an international, multiethnic, cosmopolitan spirit emerges to demonstrate that the human heart prevails. It is not so much sentimental, as unbelievable. It may be what everyone wants, like everyone wanted Woody in "Toy Story" to make friends with Buzz Lightyear, and they did, finally. On the level of Buzz and Woody, " Beautiful People" delivers. The Wolf |
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