BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

When you live next door to a slaughterhouse there's bound to be some blood and nasty bits thrown into your yard, and so it is in Britain during the mid-1990s, with the inferno of Bosnia raging just a short plane ride away. Refugees from both sides pour into a London already choked with immigrants (and immigrant-haters). BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE's magnificent, “Magnolia”-like narrative structure follows numerous interlinked characters, English and non-English, upper-class to lowest, touched by the carnage. A veteran BBC cameraman loses his sanity (and wants to lose his leg) because of what he's seen. An obstetrics doctor in a marital and an emotional breakdown rediscovers his true worth by tending to a traumatized Muslim couple. A Welsh separatist shares a hospital room with Serb and a Croat, ex-neighbors bent on beating each other to death whenever the nurse turns her back. Crazy happenstance brings a skinhead hooligan and heroin-user to awaken from his stupor right smack on the battlefield itself. Without pulling any punches (but with a merciful leavening of wry humor) filmmaker Jasmin Dizdar suggests that healing is indeed possible, even after the most appalling of modern civil wars.