Rare is the film that can be funny, disturbing and optimistic at the same time. “Dirty Pretty Things” at least manages them all in quick succession.
London is a brutal metropolis in this film, but also a stand-in for any big city. As its immigrant population looks to New York as the beautiful escape to freedom, we consider that there is no real escape in any literal sense.
The cast of characters is entirely non-English, mostly émigrés and refugees with barely any rights. They all struggle for money, employment and survival. Chjwetel Ejiofor (“Amistad”) plays Okwe, a doctor in exile from Nigeria. We see the city and its inhabitants through his sleep-deprived eyes
His mornings are theoretically spent sleeping on the couch he rents in a coworker’s tiny apartment. Senay (Audrey Tautou, “Amelie”) is a transplanted Turk who works illegally as a maid in the Baltic Hotel, where Okwe works nights at the front desk.
But we do not see Okwe sleep. He spends his days as a livery driver and nights at the hotel, and his spare time visiting a friend (Benjamin Wong in his film debut) at his workplace — a hospital morgue.
When Okwe pulls a human heart from a plugged toilet in the hotel, he is thrust into a series of ethical crises. He is a medical doctor who is honest and conscientious, wedged by circumstance into subhuman conditions. He struggles to rise above the lowly immorality of those at society’s bottom rung. To reveal anything to the police is to expose himself as an illegal immigrant, so he instead must work within the moral void that thrives below the surface of urbania.
There is a sense of a modern “Upstairs/Downstairs,” in which the upper class is virtually unseen. We are shown the disposable lower class; the immigrants whose cheap labor is exploited so that all “above” can be contented.
Okwe’s unsettled attitude towards those in his circles may be the result of his former professional status, or it may demonstrate character that exists regardless of class or circumstance. What is relevant is his humanity, which he maintains while others around him either abandon theirs or have it taken from them. He exists as an example of the human ability to survive — if only that — in the face of all that is negative.
“Dirty Pretty Things” is a very well-scripted and well-acted film, and it is beautiful for its grotesquerie. There is little that is truly pretty about the film but for the assumption that truth is beauty and vice versa. But there is plenty that is dirty ? including the souls of most of the supporting characters.
Juliette (Sophie Okenedo, “Go Now”) is a prostitute who is blasé but caring. Zlatko Buric (“Pusher”) plays a hotel doorman who may have a good heart but is not necessarily governed by it. The hotel’s manager — played by Sergi Lopez (“With a Friend Like Harry”) — is the sleazy center of the intrigue, manipulating and exploiting the position of his subordinates.
The film begins lightly, but it loses its sense of humor through most of the latter half of the film. Unlike other downward-spiral movies, it does maintain hope. The audience doesn’t know whether things will end well or badly, and the suspense is exactly like that of real life. Okwe’s desperate optimism — that even in London’s dingy underside there can be hope — is the point.
Director Steven Frears (“High Fidelity”) gives us real characters that, for all their bleakness, inspire our sympathy. He paints London vividly, with help from his talented cast and their human reactions to rank surroundings. “Dirty Pretty Things” is that rarest of movies, both extraordinary and real.
Grade: A
