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Dirty Pretty Things
Up in smoke
Solidarity Books raided, collective’s members fear “political profiling”
Dirty Pretty Things
(R) 4 stars
Over the past two decades, Stephen Frears has become — along with Ken Loach and Mike Leigh — one of Britain’s foremost chroniclers of people at the fringes of society: gay youth in My Beautiful Laundrette, con artists in The Grifters and antisocial record store clerks in High Fidelity. Now, in Dirty Pretty Things, Frears takes on a much larger and profoundly more complex subculture: London’s illegal immigrant class — or as the film’s main character, Okwe bluntly puts it: “the people who drive your cabs, clean your rooms, and suck your cocks.” Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a political exile, was a respected physician in Nigeria. But in London he barely scrapes by, driving a taxi by day, and working the night shift as a front desk clerk at a middle-grade hotel. One night, he is called on by the hotel’s resident sex worker, Juliette (Sophie Okonedo), to unstop a blocked toilet. The cause of the blockage, he discovers, is a human heart, freshly removed from its owner. The hotel manager, Sneaky (Sergi Lopez) disavows all knowledge of the incident, and suggests Okwe forget what he’s seen, if he wants to keep his job. Okwe is a man trying desperately to forget a lot of things, chief among them the wife and child he left behind in Nigeria, and the desire he feels for his roommate, chaste Turkish refugee Senay (Audrey Tautou in a refreshingly non-gamine role, although she does lay on the Turkish accent rather too thickly). When Senay finally asks Okwe why he left Nigeria, he says simply, “It is an African story.” Although his character is a man of few words, Ejiofor plays him with remarkable expressiveness, his liquid eyes and proud bearing telegraphing Okwe’s struggle to preserve his dignity in the midst of a very dirty situation. In the immigrant underworld Frears depicts, everyone is on the take — whether to help out fellow foreigners, like Okwe, who provides ad hoc emergency medical services, with his friend Guo Yi (Benedict Wong), a hospital morgue worker, lifting the needed supplies and medicines, or to profit from others’ desperation, like Sneaky, who exacts an impossibly high price for the counterfeit EU passports that every undocumented worker covets. When clues from a patient dying of a botched operation lead Okwe back to his own hotel, he discovers the true nature of Sneaky?s black market operation, and marshals the staff in a plot to bring vigilante justice to their exploiter. “There is nothing so dangerous as a virtuous man,” muses Guo Yi over a game of chess with Okwe, and we — and Sneaky — soon find out why. Dirty Pretty Things is an odd — albeit very English — hybrid of social realism and popcorn thriller. Although the latter genre supplies the film’s energetic pace and bittersweet but satisfying conclusion, the characters themselves, and the back alleys, dingy flats, and fluorescent all-night cafes where they scramble to eke out a living, ultimately prove more compelling than the mystery they’re trying to solve.
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