As with Up and Down, Beauty in Trouble is an intersection (or, since this is Hřebejk and Jarchovský, collision) of different stories, though with a much tighter structure. Prague is a small world in these films, so any action happening in some dark corner of Žižkov is bound to eventually haunt someone in Dejvice. Plus, the two artists are firm believers that no good turn will go unpunished. Well-intentioned deeds have a way of later ruining lives.

Marcela (Aňa Geislerová) and her two children live in the flood-wrecked autoshop of her husband, Jarda (Roman Luknár), who has taken to refitting stolen cars. On the other side of the shop lives Jarda's mother (the superb Emilia Vašáryová), a woman who has fallen into the embrace of a Protestant sect of charlatans. The conditions in the shop become unbearable for Marcela, and she leaves with her children for her mother's house. But life back home is hardly a nostalgic retreat. Her mother (Jana Brejchová) is married to an ill and sleazy man (Jiří Schmitzer) whom Marcela detests.

Hřebejk and Jarchovský are often accused of misanthropy, which is an unfair tag. If anything, they are hyper-realists, and so their picture of people (and through these human puzzle parts, the bigger image of society) is brutally frank. The most contemptible character will end the film in an ideal situation, while a flawed but decent person will lose most of everything. If Up and Down was tied up in rather too neat of a knot, Beauty ends with a bracing ambiguity. Marcela, the beauty, has been in trouble all of her life, and the final balance she thinks she's achieved between her husband and Evžen seems destined to knock her down in the future. But that is life.

The performances are all excellent: the sad-eyed Brejchová, torn between her natural maternal instincts and defending her desiccated, diabetic husband, the flesh-creeping Schmitzer; Abrhám, the suave, decent expat, whose kindnesses all rear back to bite him. Then there's Vášáryová, who stole Up and Down as the spurned, racist wife, returning here as a fanatically Christian mother, who, if she could, would stage-manage heaven.