July 31-August 6, 2003

movies

Melting Potboiler

What lies beneath: Audrey Tatou puts the pretty in Dirty Pretty Things.

Stephen Frears revamps the thriller for a polyglot world.

by Sam Adams

"Everything here is connected!" shouts a Turkish Muslim to her Nigerian flatmate in Dirty Pretty Things. She’s merely admonishing him not to do the dishes while she’s in the shower, but the line’s resonance is hard to miss. In a sense, the film’s characters, recent immigrants of varying degrees of legality, lead disconnected lives, working off the books, keeping their heads down, barely speaking the language of their new country. Invisibility means safety, but it also dulls the spirit, threatening the very individuality that sent them from their homes.

Much of Dirty Pretty Things is set in a London hotel, but we catch only fleeting glimpses of the guests; where most movies would concern themselves with the people occupying the hotel's rooms, this one concerns itself with the people who clean them. It's in cleaning one of them that Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) begins to learn about the things that go on in the hotel after the day staff has clocked out; investigating a clogged toilet, he finds the source of the problem: a human heart.

By now, it's well established that Okwe already has too much on his plate. He works two jobs back-to-back, the other as a taxi driver, chewing an unidentified root to keep himself awake. (Just as well, he says: He doesn't like to sleep.) Still unable to afford his own place, he shares a room with Senay (Audrey Tautou), a chambermaid at the hotel, who insists on passing her key to him every morning at work rather than giving him his own. The script, by Steve Knight (a creator of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire), is initially stingy with the details of Okwe's past, one he seems to want to forget. Hints surface about a past in the medical profession -- his only real friend is a wisecracking Chinese coroner, played with bone-dry wit by Benedict Wong -- but he seems determined to stick to his new blue-collar life.

With his stoic reserve and hidden past, Okwe is as upright as any Hollywood hero, and he has an antagonist to match: A Spaniard named Juan, known to all as Sneaky. Played with oily grace by Sergi López (With a Friend Like Harry), Sneaky wears a bellman's uniform, but he's an operator, pure and simple. He's got a scam for every room in the hotel, the most unsavory of which involves convincing illegal immigrants to sell off their organs for a phony passport -- thus the heart in the toilet, an attempt to cover up an operation gone wrong. Sneaky, of course, already knows everything is connected, and how, which is why he knows Okwe's a doctor, and what it would take to blackmail him to take part in Sneaky's organs-for-dollars operation. He knows, even before either of them suspect it, that Okwe and Senay are in love, and has already begun to exploit it. "The hotel business is about secrets," he tells Okwe. "They come to the hotel in the middle of the night to do dirty things, and in the morning, it's our job to make them pretty again."

Sneaky's world is one illuminated by the half-light of a hotel kitchen, perfectly captured by Chris Menges' liquid lighting. Director Stephen Frears, who depicted a London steeped in sexual and ethnic complexity in My Beautiful Laundrette, has joked that he set out this time to make a movie "without any parts for white Englishmen," and while that's not quite true (a pair of immigration investigators comes gunning for Senay with alarming regularity), it's clear that Frears means to flip-flop the codes of invisibility that govern most movies. There's a ghostly quality to the film's compositions, like a fairground after the people have gone home. It's not just that we don't see white Englishmen; it's as if they don't exist, and all that's left is the people those Englishmen might ordinarily choose to ignore.

Knight's script deliberately flirts with genre, embracing it tightly as the movie builds to a climax before bidding it a fond farewell a few moments before the movie itself ends. But if the shape of Dirty Pretty Things is familiar, its characters are not. Though much of Frears' principal cast spoke no English (the London-born Ejiofor, the exception, had to adopt a Nigerian accent), there's no awkwardness to their acting; freed of the need to speak perfect English, they speak it perfectly. The occasional stumble might even help take the edge off Knight's slightly too-slick script. (Quips Sneaky after he's presented Okwe with a particularly nasty proposition, "I just wanted to put a wasp in your head.") The endless mixing of cultures -- Chinese tea or English, Jesus or Mohammed, pork or lamb -- doesn't carry over into the filmmaking, but then Frears has always been most expressive at his most low-key. (It's when he tries for high style, or crosses the ocean, that he gets in trouble.) Dirty Pretty Things might, to invoke the cliche, celebrate difference, but more importantly, it acknowledges it as something we can't live without.

Dirty Pretty Things

Directed by Stephen Frears A Miramax release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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