Dirty Pretty Things (2003)

 

Dirty Pretty Things can be a difficult film to categorize. It’s sometimes called a thriller or a crime drama or even a romance of sorts, which it is at times, albeit a very unconventional one, certainly. It’s also a searing examination of the immigrant experience in London, that city where so many of the formerly colonized have gone to try to make a new life. I’ve always considered it primarily a character study focusing on Okwe (played perfectly by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cab driver and night desk clerk at the Baltic Hotel who was a doctor in his home country of Nigeria. That’s quite the character description, isn’t it? Okwe always seems to be the moral center of the plot, never wanting, as he puts it, to harm anyone and always trying to do the moral or right thing. However, after he discovers a heart clogging a toilet in one of the hotel rooms, he (and we) has to confront a rather bizarre series of plot twists. The woman he loves, a Turkish immigrant named Senay (Audrey Tautou), faces the constant threat of raids by immigration officers because she’s not supposed to be working (at the hotel or at a sweatshop) or taking rent from someone else like Okwe. Their scenes together are lovely but challenging because we know what they seem unable to say: they love each other. We also learn that the hotel manager, a guy called Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), has been selling organs like kidneys on the black market in exchange for forged passports and citizenship papers, and he’s been using vacant hotel rooms as the locations for the surgeries. Befitting such dark subject matter, the film features some very evocative gritty cinematography so that we’re always aware of the kind of lives these people have to endure. Most of the characters are from somewhere other than London or England, and the international cast brings the plight of the undocumented to the surface throughout the film. Dirty Pretty Things has some exceptional actors in addition to Ejiofor and Tautou, including Sophie Okonedo as Juliette, a hooker with a good heart (and who gains a great deal of depth with the Okonedo’s performance), and Benedict Wong as Guo Yi, Okwe’s friend who works in a crematorium and helps him to obtain medical supplies from the hospital. Decades after its initial release, Dirty Pretty Things still has the ability to shock at times and to move a viewer to tears, and few films can take as many risks as it does with such great results.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Screenplay