Beautiful People

A Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Croat launch into a fight on a London Bus. The wife of an overworked doctor leaves her husband. A headmaster's son goes off to create trouble at an England football game and an MP's daughter falls in love with a Bosnian refugee.

The Serb and the Croat continue to fight throughout the course of the film. The doctor takes home a Bosnian Muslim couple. The headmaster's son gets on the wrong plane home and finds himself on the front-line in Bosnia. He rescues a small boy who he then takes home with him, and the MP's daughter marries her refugee - for love or to help him stay legally in England?

Regardless of writer-director Jasmin Dizdar's intentions, his attempts to highlight the Bosnian conflict and how it affected and still affects those in London is shockingly banal, with a cast of wafer-thin stereotypes enacting a series of farcical episodes connected by this one theme. And despite Dizdar being commissioned to write specifically on the issue, it is sidelined; the Bosnian conflict is reduced to a narrative device. This culminates in a bizarre attempt to traverse the geographical boundaries and make a physical connection between Bosnia and London (in the form of a drunken football hooligan who inadvertently ends up part of an aid mission) which requires suspension of all disbelief, if you have the patience to even get this far.

Sadly, what started out as an interesting premise becomes a badly acted, badly written and badly directed attempt at a whirlwind comedy. All Dizdar manages to do in the course of these 107 minutes is simply display to us his admiration for Bosnian director Emir Kusturica and precious little else.

Reviewed by Jovan Ilic