Beautiful People (I) (1999) User Reviews

A very British love it or hate it film.

[=G= · 6/10 · 15 December 2000]

"Beautiful People" spreads it's story of the effect of the Bosnian conflict on Brits and others thinly over a broad and varied cast of characters with the feel of a documentary in spite of considerable implausibility. Mostly shot in the UK sans any Hollywoodesque appointments, this film weaves several very short and loosely interconnected stories into it's sometimes harsh, sometimes humorous fabric. "Beautiful People" - which are scarce in this austere film - leaves little room for audience empathy but is replete with ironies. The film will play best with those who appreciate British cinema.

Joyous, delightful, carried off with humour & elegance

[decibel-5 · 8/10 · 29 May 2000]

Beautiful People deals with some grim & difficult topics – war in Bosnia, drugs, divorce, illegal immigration & more (without giving away any secrets) & uses the currently rather popular device of intertwining story lines to do so, but carries it off with humour & elegance. Such a combination of themes could have been sordid & depressing or worse trite, but in contrast Beautiful People is joyous & exhilarating – a real delight & well worthy of your time.

It would be an excellent movie, only if...

[evilmatt-3 · 6/10 · 7 September 2000]

To me, this is one of the greatest tragedies of 1999. A nice cast and intriguing story have the potential to elevate this to a great piece of work, yet it fails on a couple of fundamental levels. First, _Beautiful People_ is overburdened with cliches: the immigrant who wants to know "the meaning of life," the mortal enemies who have the same shoe size, etc. I found these excessive to the point that they triggered my gag reflex. Second, and more damaging to the film, it is edited extremely poorly. There are simply too many characters and storylines for this director to handle well. By the time a particular storyline comes around again, the audience has completely forgotten it. (Incidentally, this multiple character and storyline trick can be pulled off with great success- Paul Thomas Anderson did a superb job in _Magnolia_). The film does have its high points, in particular the spectacular performance by Charlotte Coleman. Not bad, but that's about all one can say.

Typically British, yet.. not.

[bowfi780 · 25 January 2001]

I went to the theatre cold, had heard nothing about Beautiful People beyond its title. I was fairly unimpressed with the first part of the movie; the opening scenes from the tussle of the bus were elegaically constructed and did serve as the 'running' commentary for the film, but other scenes were set up quite stodgily: the Conservative family with the renegade child (I did enjoy the element of class consciousness in the hospital scene where she hesitantly asks for help from the nurses); the father stuck with the kids when their mother leaves (because he's such a prat?); the artistic and neglectful mother... the stuff of many British films and almost every Sunday night teleplay. What lifts Beautiful People is its awareness, and consequent subversion, of this predictable British fare. From the second the skinhead wanders in a fairytale-like trance into a trolley of supplies destined for Bosnia, the film busts the genre wide open. This happenning gives the film permission to explore the stories to their possible happy resolutions. If only a racist skinhead could get his face pushed into the lives some of those he ignorantly attacks! The scene at the end, where the racists are reading a bedtime fairy story to the blinded Bosnian child is our cue that this part of the film has, indeed, been nothing more than a fairytale. All fairytales are a gory story with a moral twist from which children learn how life is. And so with the intent of this film. The daughter of a Conservative minister would never marry a refugee so he could stay in the country, and the family would certainly not accept such a marriage - think of the scandal! Yet, once the barrier of British realism has been rent asunder by the skinhead's fall into Bosnia (not quite Wonderland!), this becomes possible. The realism remained with the war scenes, and I think these are what we are supposed to have lodged in our minds when we leave the theatre. I can't imagine the real Bosnia was much different to this. The final message I took from the film is: if you had experienced it, then you would be craving for happy endings too. I liked it. I forgot how lumbering the first part of the film was once the filmmaker gave herself permission to dispense with realism. I left the theatre thinking very deeply about the conflict in Bosnia; which was as it should be.

Mediocre at best

[cpu-4 · 6/10 · 2 April 2000]

Beautiful People doesn't have a very intelligent plot and the acting (perhaps as a result) is mediocre at best. The whole movie also comes across as being a bit forced.

It deals with the conflict between Serbs and Kroats, but the acting and little jokes are just too clumsy and unsophisticated to really be taken seriously... because there *are* quite a few statements that the director seems to want to come across it fails to be amusing or entertaining as well.

Having said that, there is one amusing part where an English hooligan ends up in the war. If the director had gone for more of similar absurdities and for less rather blunt moral statements the result would have had more impact IMO.

Implausible but good

[SusanAdebisi · 7/10 · 4 December 2005]

Very contrasting ideas here mixing the violence of the former Yugoslavia with the shallowness of the British upper middle classes. Throw In smack, Tottenham fans on the loose, Immigration, a depressed journalist, snobbery, an overworked doctor a blind kid plus a whole lot more and the result Is an eclectic film that's got enough about It to succeed.

The tone does flip wildly from war zone misery to light domestic matters and that can be a little off-putting, and has been mentioned some of the sound work & a few of the accents are dubious at best. Charlotte Coleman Is very good as the central lead even though she Is peripheral to many of the more memorable moments. The dark comedy Is very funny and unlike so many British films It's not a case of "Who's he?" or "what's she been In?". Most of all It's got spirit & conviction, definitely worth persisting with.

An Excellent and Very Different Movie

[claudio_carvalho · 9/10 · 16 February 2004]

In contemporary London, five stories with refugees from former Yugoslavia are presented in a chaotic and mixed way, some of them with points of contact. The best and funniest story is about a drugged hooligan who travels to Rotterdam with two addicted friends to watch a soccer game between Netherlands x England. After the game, when England lost it, in the airport, he is so drugged in heroin that he sleeps inside a box of international aid to Bosnia. The box is dropped by parachute in the front of the war, and our `hero' wakes-up in the middle of a battle. He meets a young boy, who becomes blind, and helps people in an improvised hospital of the United Nations before coming back home. There is the story of a cinematographer who gets a kind of syndrome due to the horrors he witnessed in the war, specially the amputation of a leg without any resources. There is another story about a fight between a Croat and a Serbian, beginning in a bus and ending in the hospital in London. There is a story of a raped young woman who gets pregnant. Her husband wants that her English doctor makes an abortion. By the other hand, the doctor is full of personal problems with his wife. There is a romance between a refugee from former Yugoslavia and a daughter of a conservator English politician. The way the stories are presented looks like a documentary, or the news on television, and is very different. The movie does not present clichés and has lots of English black humor. I myself loved it. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): `Beautiful People'

Down and out in London and Bosnia

[paul2001sw-1 · 7/10 · 1 December 2005]

War-torn Bosnia and multicultural London don't look so very different in Jasmin Dizdar's raucous, riotous, kaleidoscopic film 'Beautiful People'. An initially merciless portrait of both Britons and Bosnians gradually mutates into something more sympathetic, but the picture remains extreme: this is not the subtlest of movies. But there are some fine moments of black humour, and a strong performance especially from Nicholas Farrell as a doctor worn down by life. It's also nice (but sad) to see the late Charlotte Coleman in one of her last screen roles. There's less political content here than you might expect: it's a shallower film than 'Welcome to Sarejevo', and less madly surreal than 'Underground'. But it's still worth watching for odd snippets of brilliance in among the chaos.

The funny side of Bosnia

[tim-182 · 9/10 · 22 September 1999]

Beautiful People is an easy watch jet black comedy.Heroin addiction and extreme racism are given an improbable humorous edge in a way that you don't expect. The film has some startling switches in it. My only criticism would be that the scene explaining the psychiatrist's diagnosis of Bosnia Syndrome should have come earlier on to help explain to viewers the odd actions of the actors.

Notwithstanding that it is a great film. Bonus points if you can pick out the scenes that were shot in Liverpool instead of London and watch out for handy hints on how to peg out washing with a head full of heroin !

Cllr Tim O'Kane

Oh Dear Another British Black Comedy

[Theo Robertson · 4/10 · 29 November 2005]

As I write this in November 2005 I've become aware that the great British boom of cinema has come to an end and while people will claim much of this is down to the British government not giving film makers tax breaks I think the cause is much simpler - A lack of diversity on the part of producers over the last few years . Let's have a look at what the Brits were producing 1995-2005:

Funky gangster thrillers . LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRALES was a truly great and thoroughly entertaining film and people went out of their way to ape Guy Ritchie's style with usually disappointing results

Romantic comedies . Yeah okay I do realise FOUR WEDDINGS , NOTTING HILL etc were produced by American studios but they're still vaguely " British films " . Unfortunately because they're guaranteed to make a profit for the studios they have to follow a winning formula which usually involved Hugh Grant playing Hugh Grant for the umpteenth time

Black Comedies . Can anyone explain what a black comedy actually is ? In the British context it's usually a rambling film with often contemporary political statements made and which often resembles Mike Leigh's NAKED

Jasmin Disdar's BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is a good example of the third type of British movie . Filmed in 1999 but set in 1993 it opens with two men having a fight on a bus and it's later revealed that one's a Serb and one's a Croat so we get a bite sized rundown of what was happening in the Balkans at that time , though what's the odds of two former enemies in the Balkans bumping into each other on a London bus ? This sums up one of the major flaws of the movie - Irony takes precedence over likely situations , you can appreciate the final irony of the subplots but is the outcome likely ? Perhaps the greatest irony is the title of the film . It's called BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE but certainly this audience member found them clichéd stereotypical people that I couldn't believe in as three dimensional characters

Edge and talent.

[paulcreeden · 9/10 · 25 July 2001]

I was excited to find this film on cable, since it whipped through my local art house when it was in theaters so fast I had no chance to get to see it. My excitement was justified. I was moved by the film's edge and its talent. It was truly refreshing to see the combination of hand held camera technique and world class acting, with the likes of Linda Basset, Nicholas Farrell and Charlotte Coleman. As an American, who was shielded, as most of us were, from what was really happening in Europe during the Bosnian war of the mid nineties, I felt like a child who was finally getting the real story about a family secret. The presentation of realistic characters in a vibrant and real collage of parallel and interlaced lives, brought the big issues of ethnic hatred, racism, class prejudice and sexism into painful and sometimes humorous focus. I was very happy with the film's conclusion. It brought all those big issues to the table in a brilliant metaphor for the human condition, as it really exists under all the crap. A wonderful movie.

What is it with the sound?

[John-196 · 4/10 · 24 November 2000]

I had to lower my rating of this movie to a 4 due to the terrible sound track. I'm pretty sure it was not a problem with me or the tape, because some actors and the sound track sounded great. But most of the actors voices were distorted or garbled beyond recognition, especially for non-brits.

There are plenty of cute little twists that would make this an enjoyable movie - ending up in Bosnia by mistake is great - but much of the humor was lost in the sound.

Highly UNDERRATED masterpiece!

[Exiled_Archangel · 10/10 · 11 May 2004]

Beautiful People is a very interesting movie, not the least bit like anything else you could have seen. It's British to the bone, yet it deals with the lives of non-British people. It's exhilarating, sad, depressing, scary, and everything! Definitely the best effort by British cinema since A Clockwork Orange. Yes, better than Lock Stock, Dirty Pretty Things, and any other British film you can think of. Those who say this movie is overrated, or the acting is crap: I recommend you Terminator3, that's the only type of acting you can bear with. 100% superficial!

This movie nailed me to the screen, and I found it light but rewarding. Maybe it's my Yugoslav roots, but I haven't witnessed the war after all. If you have, you'll be even more fascinated by this flick. It's not that hard to make a good movie about the Yugoslavia issue, but it's hard to make it so light and so beautiful at the same time. But then again, it would be totally unfair to say the movie is about Yugoslavia alone. Actually it's hard to tell what it's about, and that's exactly what makes it beautiful and precious.

It's just perfect.. Go see it NOW!

10/10

A little gem.......

[prose · 31 May 2004]

I love British movies - most of them, at least - and this one was no exception. It was on late night TV, and the mention of Charlotte Coleman's name amongst the cast convinced me to stay up to watch it. Most everything which could be said about it has been said.

For me, it left me with a lot to think about. It was not a stab at realism, but had a strong impact all the same. I quite enjoyed the somewhat chaotic, circular storytelling style, as the viewer is reacquainted again and again with some characters, as they stumble through their lives.

My favourite set-up was the hospital bed companion of the Serb and Croat - himself a Welshman who hates the English, and is in hospital having been blown up with an incendiary device he was buying - to blow up English property, no doubt. He's forever trying to stop the Serb and Croat from killing one another, completely oblivious that his own blind prejudice - whilst justifiable - is destructive, and mirrors their own.

A must-see for fans of British film.

Unbelievably beautiful and moving film; it touches the soul.

[clotblaster · 10/10 · 13 January 2006]

I am going to limit my comments basically to all those people who rated this movie below a nine or ten. For most people this is a movie that must be watched twice, but if you don't feel your heart pounding at the end of the film and tears in your eye, no matter how many times you watch, YOU, viewer needs to take stock of your own heart, imagination, empathy for different people (true diversity) and your ability to respond appropriately to truly great films. I tire of people who tell me about books and plays and movies:"It's just your opinion." Well, sometimes that is true. But if your soul and imagination has not been properly educated by reading good books (especially poetry), seeing good plays (especially Shakespeare, and seeing quality movies and distinguishing them from the meretricious and the bogus. This is not a time where it is just my opinion. This is a movie that celebrates life in the most difficult of situations and blends together various characters' lives into a seamless whole--a kind of good Magnolia, to which it has been fatuously compared. The story is set in diverse modern day London--all classes, different ethnic groups etc. The writer/director Jazmin Didmar is a magician weaving a tapestry of humanity that screams at the viewer: "LIfe is tough, but there is still a place for love and beauty, even in the direst circumstances." I am so fed up with American movie goers who can't tell diamond from glass. This is a wonderful movie which deserves a 10+ rating. I quote from one of the characters, who is having troubles in his personal life and in his profession. But he comes through at the end of the movie happy and smiling with an ending comment: "If life works just a little bit in your favor, it can be beautiful." SEE THIS MOVIE. (p.s. Americans can be forgiven their lack of discernment in films, because they grow up on wretched American t.v. By the way I am a natural born surfer boy from SoCAl--actually Orange County).

wildly overrated

[artdeco-2 · 2/10 · 19 August 2000]

This very forced attempt to fuse Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino (who is wildly overrated himself) is neither informative nor entertaining. The character development is arbitrary and unbelievable -- especially in the final scene of the thugs and the little boy, as other reviewers have noted. Also, a couple of humorous moments aside, the film is not as funny (black humor or otherwise) as the director seems to think it is.

british beauty

[ukharold · 9/10 · 22 February 2000]

if you liked american beauty this movie has a similarly beautiful-there really aren't enough english words for beautiful-message-yet the similarities end there--this drama about several bosnian refugees in london is full of people with problems-british and bosnian alike-full of the very modern idea of multiple story-character storytelling-see it really-ok

no place for imagination

[Heidi-96 · 2/10 · 25 March 2006]

What I miss most of all in this film is that it lets no place for imagination, everything is said. It is like a documentary film, but not as good as a documentary, because it is no documentary. A patchwork film without a continuous story. Very superficial, nothing to think about, because the film tells you already what you are supposed to think. Too many different problems are touched but none is worked out in order to make you think. I do not even know if it is a funny film that wants to be serious or a serious film that wants to be funny. Many scenes are very unrealistic, and the acting is quite poor. The film is quite boring.

I liked the movie

[mpooley-2 · 10/10 · 12 January 2000]

I only came across this wonderfully black comedy whilst flicking through the movie channels on a flight between Auckland and Sydney and so missed the first 10 minutes or so. However I saw enough to be so enthused as to want to register my comments on IMDb. It deserves 9.5 out of 10 as far as I'm concerned. My only gripe is that I can find no details of a release date in Australia.

There are 5 stories in one here. 2 are slightly and only fleetingly connected and 1 has an ironically savage twist in the tail. The twist is not quite as startling as that in "Sixth Sense" but it's up there in my book!

All stories concern refugees in London from the recent Bosnian/Serbian conflict and if it was the director's aim to show how good, beauty, truth and humour can be found in what appear to be the most hopeless of people and situations she has succeeded admirably. There is one rather "twee" moment when one of the characters reads a bedtime story and one rather unbelievable (from an aviation professional's point of view!) scene at Rotterdam(?) Airport in the same story, but these are very very minor criticisms of what is a most heartwarming film.

There are no big name stars (The only actor I recognised and that from British TV drama series, was Siobhan Redmond) but the ensemble playing is excellent throughout. However, if pushed, I would award top billing to Linda Bassett as The Nurse for her placid good nature and her deadpan reaction to some of the comments from the 3 patients in her charge.

One line verdict? Forget the blockbusters..See Beautiful People!

Beautiful, People

[Quicksand · 10/10 · 25 July 2000]

This is a very difficult film to get a handle on, or at least it was at first. As I got to know the characters, I came to love every last one of them, as the film took its time delving deeper into their lives, and eventually, into their souls.

What it found was the most beautiful and sad, beautiful and happy parts of our lives, however fleeting they may be. The film is at least a 9/10, and I'd like to cast an 11/10 for the film's poster. The most memorable film image of the decade, if not the century.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. I'm just an American.

Excellent Movie

[daxwithans · 9/10 · 6 March 2005]

Excellent movie, although the cover, I will say, is deceiving, I suggest everybody see it. And it involves British people, how can you resist that? The movie takes place in England, and revolves around many persons and families, all going through some sort of turmoil. I can't really remember what specifically, but I do remember that in many instances it revolved around war and conflict between races. Quite a good movie, and that's all I have to say. Thank you I need 10 lines, sorry. My god, why do I need ten lines of text, I have nothing more to say, stop reading from hear on out, because the rest will be rambling. I now understand why people Go ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh because they bloody need ten lines to fill, these IMDb bastards, but not.

Fine piece of indie flick

[meliajanssen · 13 June 2003]

This film highlights some of the problems faced by former Yugoslav refugees trying to start a new life in Britain. There are some light hearted moments like when a Serb and a Croat who were neighbours in their former homeland fight with each other and end up next to each other in the hospital (highlighting the basis of the Yugoslav war). Some of the more common refugee problems are also highlighted (you'd have to watch to find out). There is hardly any intensity in the movie but the story is still rather well told.

quite inspirational

[Cindy-39 · 8/10 · 18 March 2000]

Beautiful People offers a slice-of-life type look at the messy lives of people in London who are somehow affected by the war in Bosnia. Their stories are kind of interconnected, but in a natural way, not at all contrived. It was refreshing to see how the film combined gritty, realistic stories (the doctor trying to handle his two young sons in the midst of a separation) with some more surreal comedy (the junkie dropped in the middle of war), however, there was one ending that I found to be too unbelievable and not satisfying, and I won't give details of the ending, but it involves the man who was shot in the leg. The movie could have also done without the scene with the thugs reading to the boy -- it was predictably cheesy. Other than that, it a great film, and delivers a really strong message in the end, which explains the title, Beautiful People.

Welcome to the sceptered isle; meet the forces of conservatism

[hammy-3 · 9/10 · 5 November 1999]

This is a film that a lot of people need to go and see, who might be reluctant to label anyone else a force of conservatism after doing so. At first it seems like yet another British State-of-the-nation movie with ostensibly unconnected scenes depicting British people of different classes and ethnicities. Then an unpredictable, slighlty implausible event occurs about half way through which throws all these scenes into a sharper focus. It's noble but forlorn aim is to show the people of Britain how trivial the country's problems are compared to some places in the world, and it does by depicting the plight of Bosnian refugees arriving in a working-class area of North London in 1994. Though the scenes set in Bosnia are reasonably realistic given the movies budget, and thus pretty harrowing, the most shocking thing about this film for me was the condescension demontrated by members of the English aristocracy toward the refugees. It made me want to burn every copy of the in a mass immolation in Kensington Gardens.

funny and interesting

[minavagante · 8/10 · 13 June 2000]

Having many friends and acquaintances from former-Yugoslavia, I was advised to see this movie, and found it funny to say the least. Using the intertwined stories of people more or less affected by the 1990s war, the director paints a great picture of how we humans are, and how much aggressiveness and self-destructiveness are rooted deep in our nature. However, these feelings aren't unavoidable, and this is told without abusing rosey tones (not that the rest of the picture abuses them).