Beautiful People

2000 "A comic collision of chaos and coincidence"
6.7| 1h47m| R| en| More Info
Released: 03 March 2000 Released
Producted By: Arts Council of England
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

In London, during October 1993, England is playing Holland in the preliminaries of the World Cup. The Bosnian War is at its height, and refugees from the ex-Yugoslavia are arriving. Football rivals, and political adversaries from the Balkans all precipitate conflict and amusing situations. Meanwhile, the lives of four English families are affected in different ways by encounter with the refugees.

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Reviews

Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!
Manthast Absolutely amazing
Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Alistair Olson After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Claudio Carvalho 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'
bowfi780 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.
artdeco-2 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.
Elizabeth Nolan Heard a joke that is perfect for this movie, "Beautiful People." Actually heard the joke in another movie, lines were spoken by a hit man who was claiming to be more mean and crazy than anyone else..."I'm half Serbian and half Croatian. I wake up in the morning and want to kill myself!"Seems appropriate without being offensive to anyone who has seen "Beautiful People."