Director Dizdar Gives His ‘People’ a Universal Message

They say there’s no art without conflict. If so, the former Yugoslavia must be an artist’s dream--there’s no dearth of conflict in that war-torn land.

Why then, one wonders, did Yugoslavian-born filmmaker Jasmin Dizdar choose to make his debut work a charming comedy set in contemporary London?

It isn’t that the 38-year-old Dizdar is unconcerned with what is going on in his native land--his family, after all, still lives there. He is, however, less interested in the disintegration of nations than he is in human-scale conflict and the battles that rage within families.

“I’ve lived in British society for 10 years,” he said recently over lunch in Los Angeles. Before that, he’d lived in Czechoslovakia, where he studied film. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ethnic conflict that wracked his own country all occurred after he left. He viewed it from afar.

Still, “Beautiful People,” which opens in Los Angeles today, is not a work of flight but of engagement--in one way or another, the Bosnian conflict touches all of the characters, several of whom are immigrants from the former Yugoslavia.

It is a film about collisions and a poignant look at the absurdities of everyday life as people from all kinds of backgrounds, ethnicities and temperaments bounce apart and come together in a changing and not altogether welcoming Britain.

The movie, which Dizdar wrote and directed, opens with two former neighbors from Bosnia spotting each other on a London bus. One is a Serb, the other Croat, and they immediately tear into each other.

“This is London Transport,” says the very British bus driver, looking down his nose as he pulls them apart. “We don’t behave like that.”

His condescending attitude, like that of a well-to-do family that continually (if very civilly) insults an unlettered Bosnian dinner guest, not only illustrates the British reserve that so often is shown in conflict with the relative spontaneity of outsiders, but it also is but a small-scale form of the sort of tribalism that is wreaking such havoc in the former Soviet bloc countries.

Conflicts Spill Across Borders

Dizdar said that one of his aims was to show how the world is becoming a much smaller place. Thanks to the media, conflicts in other countries provide good televised drama on the evening news (“When wars stop, you say, ‘Oh, God, I was actually enjoying it’ ”). But also today conflicts easily spill across borders and affect others.

Add “Beautiful People” to the list of films that have in recent years dealt with the experiences of immigrants. They include the touching “Someone Else’s America” by Dizdar’s fellow Yugoslavian Goran Paskaljevic; the recent “La Ciudad” about Latin American immigrants in New York; “My Son the Fanatic,” about Pakistanis in England; and Anthony Minghella’s first film, “Madly Truly Deeply.”

But though many of the characters in the six main story lines interwoven in “Beautiful People” are non-British, and though the issue of xenophobia seems to reflect upon the current situation in Eastern Europe, where Joerg Haider’s right-wing Freedom Party recently won inclusion in Austria’s ruling coalition, Dizdar said he isn’t strictly interested in the immigrant experience.

“I refuse to use terms like ‘refugee’ or ‘immigrant,’ ” said Dizdar, a gentle giant of a man who is a lot like his movie--witty, smart, imbued with an easy-going charm. “I’m more comfortable with a term like ‘outsider.’ So many people are immigrants and within a year they own a bank, and they’re quite happy. But people can be outsiders in their own society.”

He mentions several of the British characters in his movie, including a young skinhead, a rebellious woman who falls in love with a penniless Bosnian against the wishes of her family and a troubled doctor who is coming unglued because his wife has left him and taken the children.

Dizdar Felt Need to Leave Family Home

The immigrant experience has been a defining factor in Dizdar’s own life. It began when, after serving a mandatory stint in the army after turning 18, he decided to study film in Prague. His family was against it because of the expense, but Dizdar was dead-set on getting away.

“I love my parents, but they are practical people,” he said. “I felt I was the revolutionary. Maybe it was ambition, but it was not financial ambition. It was the ambition to shake up things.”

As is evident from his movie, Dizdar values what he calls “the existential moment,” the point of decision when one must choose whether to step out into the abyss. He made the step. Another one was when, after graduation, he decided to move to London with his then-girlfriend (and now wife) rather than return to Yugoslavia.

He loved movies growing up in Zenica, about 70 miles north of Sarajevo, but his ambition was to be a writer. This changed when he took a writing class in high school. “The instructor said, ‘This is not literature,’ ” Dizdar recalled. “ ‘If you want to write this kind of story, go to film club.’ ”

So he did. His first short film won an award. “Before I knew it, I’d made eight or nine short films and had them shown at festivals,” he recalled.

Dizdar studied filmmaking in Prague at the prestigious school that produced Milos Forman. “Among the young generation, the young Czech generation, [Forman] was a hero, something to aspire to,” says Dizdar, who wrote his thesis (and later a book) on the filmmaker. “He stood up for free speech for himself and let nothing stand in the way of his freedom.”

Forman was regarded as a dissident. “If you leave the country that meant you were the enemy of the state,” Dizdar said. Dizdar’s decision to write his thesis about Forman branded him as something of a rebel, also.

Living in U.S. Leads to Eventual Assimilation

Now he believes he is similar to Forman in another way as well.

After having lived for so long in the U.S., Forman has assimilated. His movies (“Man in the Moon,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Hair,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) seem very American. Yet, Dizdar says, they also all reflect his personal history as someone who rebelled against conformity and oppression. Each of his movies champions the individual.

Similarly, Dizdar feels that “Beautiful People,” while in some ways very British, also reflects his identity as a Yugoslavian.

“The artist draws from the society in which he lives,” he said, “but the work is colored by the richness that you bring in with you. . . . It is like bringing an exotic plant from Bosnia to Los Angeles and planting it. It will look quite different from the palms and other plants that grow here. People won’t quite know what to make of it.”

That has been the case with his movie, which won the Prix Un Certain Regard award at Cannes in 1999.

“In England they say that this is a very European film,” Dizdar said. “But in Europe, they say it is very much an English film.”

“Beautiful People” reflects his past in another way as well. With it’s interlocking stories, the movie might remind Americans of such Robert Altman movies as “Short Cuts” or “Nashville.” It also is similarly structured to Paskaljevic’s “Powder Keg,” which was released in the U.S. last year.

But Dizdar said the technique of intermingling several different story lines is an old tradition in Eastern Europe. It is evident in Forman’s early film “Taking Off,” which was very influential in Europe.

It was a way of confusing the censors, he said. “You can play with situations without anyone realizing that the film attacks the regime,” he said. “It’s very subversive.”