Beautiful People:  Comedy-drama.  Starring Charlotte Colman, Nicholas Farrel, Danny Nussbaum, Siobhan Redmond, and Edin Dzandzanovic.  Written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

A Best Picture winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Beautiful People is a high-spirited, well-turned cross-cultural film about the places where separate worlds meet, rub against, intersect and mirror each other. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Director Jasmin Dizdar’s screenplay uses the Nashville method that is now  a common storytelling technique: an skein-like series of stories that may not quite come together plotwise here, but are united by the director’s tolerant multicultural outlook.

Beautiful Peopleis set in 1993, during the height of the Bosnian war. A Bosnian and Serb meet on a London bus, proceed pound the tar out of each other send themselves both to in the hospital, in the same room, where they continue their comic war of tit for tat throughout the film.

Meanwhile, a nurse trainee (Charlotte Coleman) working at same hospital falls for another Bosnian refugee (Edin Dzandzanovic), a war-broken and near-mute angel who’s been run over by a car. She decides to bring him home to her stuffy upper-class family, whose patriarch is a British MP whose attitudes towards refugees is, at best, as condescending as a U.S. Republican’s.

Simultaneously, a racist soccer thug and heroin user (Danny Nussbaum) right out of Trainspotting, rampages through the neighborhood with his two National Front pals. He becomes so strung out, he passes out in the wrong place at the wrong time and wakes up in war-torn Bosnia, where he finds his heroin stash to be actually of some use.

There he crosses paths with a British journalist (Gilbert Martin) whom we have also met earlier, who so identifies with the suffering, he goes crackers when he gets home and tries to have his leg cut off by a passing train.

Add to that Nussbaum’s amusingly oblivious Mum and Dad (Felicity Midge and Jerry Higgins); a doctor (Nicholas Ferrell) at the hospital who stops a Bosnian couple from killing their first born child (she was raped by Serb soldiers). He then takes them home, right during a vicious custody battle with his wife over their two children (one of the films weaker gambits.  The doctor is such a patient humanitarian, it’s unclear why his wife and kids so ferociously hate him).

The first section of the film is breezy enough, if not exactly memorable.  It’s not until Nussbaum the skinheaded soccer fan, is whisked off to Bosnia that the film itself takes flight. The entire sequence is both astoundingly imaginative and hilarious. Like most everyone else in the film, Nussbaum is pleasingly, if predictably, transformed by his experience. But once he returns home the film settles quietly back down and becomes mild and somewhat predictable, with one too many awwwwww moments.    

Luckily Dizdar’s message of hope and optimism doesn’t tie things up too neatly.    In the end, people are left tentatively groping towards each other, while still carrying the baggage of their respective pasts. Beautiful People may not resonate to American audiences so much, cling to the memory very strongly as a film, but the note of hope it leaves is refreshing and one worth paying heed to.  It’s easy to see why European audiences, with their war-torn history would take to it so lovingly.       

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