Themes: Immigrant Life, Blackmail, Fighting the System
Main Cast: Audrey Tautou, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sergi López, Benedict Wong, Sophie Okonedo
Release Year: 2002
Country: UK
Run Time: 94 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Director Stephen Frears returns to the grittier themes of his earlier films for the urban thriller Dirty Pretty Things. Residing in London, the medically trained Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Nigerian immigrant working as a taxi driver and a hotel concierge, but he still lives on the edge of poverty. He shares a room with Senay (Amélie's Audrey Tautou making her English-language debut), a Turkish refugee who works as a maid at the hotel. As illegal immigrants, Okwe and Senay live in fear of being deported. One night, working at the front desk, Okwe receives a call from prostitute Juliette (Sophie Okonedo) to check a broken toilet, where he makes a horrifying discovery. He reports it to the manager Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), who blackmails Okwe into staying quiet about it. Okwe soon discovers the presence of a shady business operation that sends him into the seedy London underworld. Senay becomes lured in with hopes of being able to fund her escape to America. Dirty Pretty Things marks the screenwriting debut of Steve Knight, co-creator of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
Review
After biding time between glossy Hollywood productions and U.K. domestic comedy-dramas, director Stephen Frears returns to the multiethnic, working-class milieu that served his seminal early work, with inspired results. Dirty Pretty Things is that rarest of beasts, the sort of thing only the British can produce: the proletariat mystery-thriller. Former game-show impresario Steve Knight delivers a script that adheres to all the standard tenets of the paranoid thriller, but where he, Frears, and the talented cast make the material their own is in the colorful, grimy details of immigrant life in modern-day London. In fact, for its first third, one might think Dirty Pretty Things is a slice-of-life character study. Only when bodies start popping up does the film shift into thriller mode, and thanks to the realistic tone Frears worked so hard to establish in the opening act, all the revelations, red herrings, and foreshadowing are seamlessly integrated into picture as a whole. If Dirty Pretty Things wraps up all of its plot strands a little too neatly -- complete with a very conventional mustache-twirling villain in the form of Sergi Lopez -- the genuine goodwill engendered by leads Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou (acquitting herself well in her first English-language, not to mention Turkish-accented, role) lends itself to the film's somewhat-improbable happy ending. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Nigerian who drives a cab in London during the day and mans the front desk of a hotel by night — chewing khat (a stimulant) to keep awake. Formerly a doctor in Nigeria, he is pressed into giving medical aid to other poor immigrants — including fellow cab drivers with venereal diseases. Okwe's friend Guo Yi (Benedict Wong), a resident in a hospital morgue, provides him with antibiotics under the table.
When prostitute Juliette (Sophie Okonedo) warns Okwe to check a room she is vacating, he finds the toilet overflowing. Fishing out the blockage, he finds a human heart. The manager of the hotel, Juan (Sergi López), runs an illegal operation at the hotel where immigrants sell a kidney in exchange for passports with new identities. Learning of Okwe's past as a doctor, Juan pressures him to harvest the kidneys, but Okwe refuses.
Okwe shares an apartment with Senay (Audrey Tautou), a Turkish woman who works as a maid in the same hotel. The two immigrants form a hesitant friendship, but their situation becomes untenable when immigration police begin to pursue her. He moves into the residents' lounge at the hospital. She quits her job at the hotel and takes a job in a clothing sweatshop, where the owner forces her to perform oral sex upon him under threat of reporting her. After initially enduring this humiliation, she bites his genitals and flees both the factory and her apartment — running to Okwe, who conceals her in the morgue.
In desperation, Senay agrees to exchange a kidney for a passport. Juan forces her to have sex with him before permitting her to undergo the operation. Upon learning of Senay's plan, Okwe tells Juan that he will perform the operation to ensure her safety, but only if Juan provides them both with passports and new identities. However, Okwe and Senay drug Juan, harvest his kidney, and sell it to Juan's contact.
The film ends with Senay and Okwe in the airport. Although they have fallen in love during the course of their trials, he must return to his young daughter in Nigeria (where he had been wrongly accused of his wife's murder) while she follows her dream to start a new life in New York City. Before they part, however, she gives him her cousin's address in New York.
