art : design : web : culture : ideas : inspiration : community : lifestyle : environment

film review: Dirty Pretty Things


Review by Fiona Prior, e: mccommissions@hotmail.com

Introduction
filthy dirty gorgeous ...

‘If travel is searching and home has been found, I'm not stopping’. Bjork (from Homogenic)

Director: Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters)

Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things is very dirty, very gorgeous and very dangerous … What could easily have been a movie which wallows in hopelessness and genuine, seemingly insurmountable social injustice is instead one that will touch you with its beauty, courage and sexiness.

Dirty Pretty Things is a wonderful movie which brings to our attention the twilight zone of the illegal immigrants living and working in London (or in any capital city in the world). With no legitimate identity they have no rights and no recourse to medical or legal assistance. They lack the right to work, to rent, to breathe … legally.

Their ‘illegal’ status places them at the mercy of every under-the-table employer, landlord and official. They experience continual temptation to participate in activities that are ‘genuinely’ criminal to make their vulnerability more bearable and their lives more certain. Maybe I’ve made Dirty Pretty Things sound a little heavy with this introduction. It is in fact a totally vital, exciting and strangely joy-filled movie.

Frears’ presents us with a community network of ‘illegals’: Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Nigerian surgeon who is working taxis by day, front desk of a hotel by night; Guo Yi (Benedict Wong), a charismatic Chinese hospital morgue attendant who is Okwe’s chess buddy and soul mate; Juliet (Sophie Okonedo), a kittenish prostitute, continually stoned and living totally in the moment; the taxi boys for whom Okwe ‘borrows’ a never-ending supply of antibiotics (‘popular girl that one’, quips Okwe) … and the totally delectable Senay (Audrey Tatou of Amelie fame) a Muslim Turkish sweatshop-working virgin, who bites as hard as she is abused, and who falls for Okwe though she'd rather die than 'immodestly' let him know.

The dirtiest and most disgusting of secrets is discovered by Okwe, taking place in one of the shabbily opulent rooms of the hotel in which he does night shift. Unable to call for the police, to scream ‘obscenity’ or use any of the tools of mainstream society to address this evil, Okwe refuses to be sucked into the black hole and/or to turn into a 'see no evil etc' zombie.

With his wonderfully motley crew of ‘displaceds’ Okwe cleverly orchestrates a kind of justice that satisfies both viewer and story alike. Dirty Pretty Things is all about ridiculous, bureaucratic rules and the corruption they almost inevitably create within the society they are supposedly protecting. It is also about a small group of people existing within that 'invisible' underbelly who manage to avoid being dragged into the vacuum of corruption, and who retain their dignity, wit and spirit.

I’ll warn you that although full of honour and warmth Dirty Pretty Things also contains images and information you would probably not wish to have brought to your attention.

It is a strangely captivating movie.
Not one for the kids.

Dirty Pretty Things website: http://www.go-underground.com
Screening at Palace Cinemas: http://www.palace.net.au
About CG | Editor: Kirsten Lowe | PO Box 559, Broadway 2007, Sydney, Australia
Ph: 0410 310 238 | Fax: +61 2 9555 1752 | Email: info (at) chaosgeneration (dot) com