Dirty Pretty Things
A second viewing of this 2003 thriller, set in the margins of London society among the illegal immigrants who do the jobs the English don’t want to contemplate, brings into greater clarity the glib shortcuts and sensationalism of Steven Knight’s screenplay. But it also makes me admire Stephen Frears’ filmmaking even more, because he covers up the deficiences so elegantly. “Dirty Pretty Things” is vivid and propulsive, with Frears’ crisp camerawork and an edgy electronic score creating an atmosphere of fear and unease. We really do feel we’re being drawn into a vital, harrowing London that courses beneath the preposterously wealthy surface. And Frears, as usual, gets exciting work out of his actors, including Chiwetel Ejiofor in a starmaking role as a Nigerian cab driver/hotel porter and Audrey Tautou as a Turkish maid. The first time I saw the movie I didn’t buy Tautou as a Turk, but her performance is so beautifully plangent that it hardly matters. And, to her credit, she attempts what I can only assume is a Turkish accent; she sounds markedly different (and much more lucid) than in her highest-profile English-speaking role, in “The Da Vinci Code.”
“Dirty Pretty Things” has a great hook: Okwe (Ejiofor) is sent to a room in the hotel where he works and finds a human heart in the toilet. Okwe, who was a doctor in his native country before being forced to flee, can’t ignore the grisly implications of his discovery. Soon his suspicions will be confirmed when he encounters an African immigrant with an infected gash where his kidney used to be. Like many cities, London prices out the people who do the jobs that keep it humming, but the ready availability of such employment means illegal immigrants are willing to go to extreme lengths to stay there. I kind of doubt that the black-market organ trade works the way Knight characterizes it here; the movie has an urban-myth vibe. But he’s right to dramatize the near-impossibility of life for those without the proper documents. And Frears never takes a false step in this taut, assured piece of cinema. The details bring it to life, like the Russian porter Ivan (Zlatko Buric) whipping up off-the-books room service, or Senay (Tautou) preparing to remove the hair from her upper lip before Okwe barges into her flat. There’s a line from Okwe, late in the going, that I thought was unnecessary — Knight insists on telling the audience what he’s already shown. “We are the people you do not see,” Okwe says, standing next to Senay and a hooker named Juliette (Sophie Okonedo). “We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks.” But Okonedo redeems it by slyly raising her finger to indicate that she’s the one who does that last unpleasant job. Knight wrote the line, but Frears gets his actors to make it immeasurably better.