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Video by FFWD Staff Where have all the beautiful people gone? Beautiful People is a hugely ambitious film that uses absurdist comedy and surrealism to address the issue of divisive nationalism. Set primarily in London – with a cast of characters that includes English soccer hooligans, over-worked medical professionals, over-zealous broadcast journalists, upper-class Tory parliamentarians, and Bosnian refugees (both Serbian and Croatian) – Beautiful People traces a tenuous link between the racism in the former Yugoslavia and nationalist tendencies in the U.K. Along the way, director Jasmin Dizdar dredges up almost every conceivable discriminatory attitude in order to examine the function of those attitudes in creating strife in any state composed of many nationalities. In the process, the audience is encouraged to examine its own concepts of nationality, and the inherently exclusionary nature of many such conceptions. Dizdar doesn’t shy away from the violence implicit in his subject matter, but he doesn’t make it pretty either. Right from the opening scenes, in which two characters referred to only as the Serb and the Croat begin fighting on a packed city bus then take their quarrel out into the streets, the violence here is almost always motivated by racist attitudes. The hooligans, for their part, mug a young black man in London, then board a plane for Rotterdam where they brawl with Dutch soccer fans. Class differences are accentuated, as well, with the presence of an upper-class family of a Tory backbencher. Most of these people are clearly out of touch with the economic realities of contemporary society that afflict the other characters in the film. They can only spout hollow platitudes about U.K. immigration policies and the horrors of ethnic cleansing from the comfort of their gated mansions. Dizdar mocks these buffoons and perhaps renders them a bit too much in caricature, but then, the upper-class conservatives deserve to be ridiculed for their part in furthering the downfall of British society. When the MP’s daughter brings home a third Bosnian refugee who she met on her ward in the hospital, it serves as one of the most absurd sequences of cultural collision in the entire film, and Dizdar manages this mannered comedy impressively. There is so much going on in Beautiful People that it has to be commended for its manic vitality. Indeed, the film earned the prize in the Un Certain Regard category at the 1999 Cannes festival, and it offers an impressive catalogue of near snapshots of a country in turmoil. At the same time, the intersecting lives of its numerous characters are too neatly and unrealistically assembled. This is partly a function of the surrealistic flourishes that lend the film its comic element, but it’s also the fault of Dizdar’s apparent desire to offer some kind of resolution for every conflict he presents and redemption for even his ugliest characters. It’s a well-intended political commentary that’s unfortunately weighed down by its own convictions.

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