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Dirty Pretty Things

2002, Movie, R, 97 mins

Dirty Pretty Things: Review

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS
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Veteran filmmaker Stephen Frears's uneasy mix of socially conscious slice-of-life filmmaking and thriller clichés takes place in a London underground populated by desperate asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants and refugees. Illegal Nigerian immigrant Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an educated man, but some dark secret keeps him up nights and has reduced him to toiling in low-level jobs like minicab driving. Okwe lives to work, as though constant business might stave off his demons. His only relaxation comes from playing chess with morgue attendant Guo Yi (Benedict Wong) and snatching the occasional nap on a rented couch. His "landlady," Senay (Audrey Tatou), is a Turkish refugee who respects her Muslim faith and culture but hopes to escape the dramatically circumscribed life her mother lives back home. Senay is forbidden to work while her application for asylum is being considered, but to pay her bills she cleans rooms at the slightly seedy Baltic Hotel, where Okwe mans the front desk during the night shift. Okwe's desk duties are generally light and dull until the night when, tipped off by a prostitute (Sophie Okonedo) who regularly meets clients at the Baltic, he finds that the object clogging an upstairs toilet is a human heart. Sleazy hotel manager Sneaky (Sergi Lopez) refuses to call the police, and Okwe's discreet inquiries have the unfortunate consequence of spurring Sneaky to look into his night clerk's past. Sneaky discovers that back in Nigeria Okwe was a doctor and that he left the country under a cloud. With this information in hand, Sneaky first invites, then tries to blackmail Okwe into joining the gruesome business he runs out of the Baltic's unoccupied rooms: Harvesting human organs for sale on the black market. Meanwhile, Senay is forced to leave her housekeeping job — a neighbor informed on her to Immigration — and takes a new position at a sweatshop, where she's sexually harassed by her boss (Barber Ali), a particularly degrading experience for a chaste Muslim girl. Steven Knight's portrait of London's invisible underclass, a skillful mosaic of sharply observed scenes, is far stronger than the lurid thriller that's been grafted onto it. But Ejiofor's subtle, infinitely humane performance is the invisible glue that holds everything together and Chris Menges's darkly shimmering cinematography lends the story a gritty, coolly seductive glamour. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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