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Dirty Pretty Things
***1/2
Cinema
Releases - December 13, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. UK.
107 minutes. Directed by Stephen Frears. Written by Steve Knight. Starring
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou, Sergi Lopez, Sophie Okonedo, Benedict Wong,
Zlatko Buric.
In London, an illegal Nigerian immigrant named
Okwe drives a cab by day and works behind the desk of a posh hotel at night.
He chews strange herbs to keep himself awake. Back home, he worked in government,
and in his younger days he studied medicine in New York City. Times have
changed, and the man's medical skills are now used for checking the genitals
of bosses and colleagues when popular local girls give them the
clap.
Okwe is played with a sense of weary distance
by Chiwetel Ejiofor, although his character seems to have a sense of principle,
and we get the feeling that if he were not a man without status he would
be speaking out about things that matter. In one early scene of "Dirty
Pretty Things", he is checking a blocked lavatory and makes a shocking,
challenging discovery -- someone has attempted to flush a healthy human
heart.
Some reviews may reveal where this leads the story,
but Steve Knight and Stephen Frears, the writer and director of "Dirty Pretty
Things", have bothered to give us a tale that unfolds, and I will respect
their efforts by not spilling all the beans. Instead let me suggest the texture
of the film, and how it is photographed in the tones of a slick modern studio
picture but investigates its settings with the depth of true art. How it
delves into the world of men and women who aren't supposed to exist -- the
illegal immigrants and asylum seekers of London, who aren't supposed to work
at all but have to work double-time for the purpose of survival. Who find
things tough even so. Who cannot relax even when their shifts are finished,
because soldiers of the authorities may be waiting around the
corner.
"Dirty Pretty Things" does an excellent job of
showing the hangouts of these hidden communities, how their members nod to
each other, speak in knowing tones and try their best to do each other favours.
The film has a feel for the back rooms of workplaces, where foreigners provide
much of our capital city's lifeblood, working in morgues and crowded factories,
answering calls for late night deliveries, cleaning out hotel rooms. We not
only see the fading gravitas of Okwe, but the nervous dreaming of a Turkish
girl named Senay (Audrey Tautou), the slick scheming of a Hispanic black
marketer called Juan (Sergi Lopez), the witty, world-weary wisdom of Chinese
hospital worker Benedict Wong (Guo Yi), and many other characters, some in
the foreground, others forever in the background.
The achievement of the movie is not only its
exploration of this world, but the fact that it does not feel like the kind
of stuffy expose that would make its preachy points in five minutes and bore
us for the rest of the running time. Frears is an experienced, canny filmmaker,
whose impressive past credits include "The Grifters" and "My Beautiful
Launderette". He knows that his job is to make material play to an audience,
and he shows us things that feel interesting and important while keeping
an emphasis on making the values of his characters dramatic and pushing his
story forward.
I can't help feeling that the movie would have
been better if it had taken this further. "Dirty Pretty Things" might have
been as brilliant as "The Crying Game" -- another picture that revealed the
seedy underbelly of London while giving us Hitchcockian plot turns -- if
it had cut loose, gone for stylistic flourishes, had more of a sense of grandeur
about it. The movie respects audience intelligence by making revelations
explicit in dialogue just as we're starting to realise them, but it rarely
blindsides us by springing surprises from outside our field of vision. Maybe
Frears was afraid of being disrespectful to the plights of his characters
if he made his film too flashy. He's not entirely wrong, and "Dirty Pretty
Things" is pretty darn good as it is.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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