Alejandro González Iñárritu, Biutiful, 2010.

I see only one visual occurrence of “biutiful” in the film: a brief, passing view of a drawing by Ana on the side of the fridge in Uxbal’s apartment. It is a woodsy scene, perhaps snowy, captioned “Parenos is biutiful” or, in English, Pyrenees is beautiful. Earlier she had asked, “How do you spell ‘biutiful’?” The drawing ties the snow scenes which define the beginning and end of the movie to its title.

In relation to the rest of the film, I think they represent some kind of afterworld. The trees tell us it's the Pyrenees (as in Ana's drawing). The Pyrenees in this movie work like the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse, a marvelous, special place that Uxbal can never get to—except in the imaginary world of this film. More precisely, I think the Pyrenees represent an afterlife, described simply as “over there.” They contrast to the slums of his real world.

Frankly, I don't know. There is a techno music group in Mexico with that name, and perhaps González Iñárritu has a personal association with it.

I think González Iñárritu makes the greedy Chinese bosses gay to contrast with the positive value of family. Note the brief scene in which the older Chinese boss Li is eating with his family and the younger, his lover Liwei, intrudes and his coming stops the family moment. Note that the young lover betrays the older (and is murdered for it), while the older Chinese boss tries to rescue his family.

I think the nightclub scene contrasts with the paradisal Pyrenees that Uxbal never gets to. Instead he goes to a kind of purgatory or underworld (on the model of Dante’s Inferno or Purgatorio) with bizarrely deformed bodies and all kinds of evils like drugs and prostitution, embodied by his corrupt brother Tito and the cocaine-pushing girl in pink.

We see the dying owl in the opening and closing supernatural scenes (of an afterlife?). Within the film, Uxbal's clever son Mateo tells the story as something that he has learned from his school or reading, that a owl when it dies spits out a ball of feathers (like a cat's hairball, under the word “dying” in the still to the left). Like Ana's drawing) it links the unspoiled children to a knowledge of some supernatural afterlife denied to ordinary adults (but not Uxbal or Bea). Remember that the title of 21 Grams rests on the idea of something leaving the body at the moment of death. I have read that the feather cloaks that Mexican priests and kings wore may have been connected to the idea of a soul's journeying in the form of a bird (an owl, perhaps). González Iñárritu has said that the preoccupation with death in this film comes from Mexican tradition. You can read more here. Elsewhere in the film González Iñárritu uses an image of a flock of birds rising (as a sign of uplift?).

I think the two stones (or coal?) represent something hard, indestructible, and permanent, unlike Uxbal's (or anyone's) flesh. They are what Uxbal wants his children's memories of him to be. Some onliners have identified them as black tourmaline with associations to healing and good luck. Within the film, Bea says they are “for protection.”