'Dirty Pretty Things' Shows A Pretty Dirty World

By Greg Dew
Columbus Wired Columnist
9/10/03

Urban legends have a way of finding life on the cinematic pallet Hollywood.
The tale of organs being harvested from live “donors” and sold on the black
market is given its chance to live in Stephen Frears latest film “Dirty
Pretty Things.”

Frears, director of “The Grifters” and “Dangerous Liaisons” returns with a
thriller set in the seedy London underworld. This unseen world is inhabited
with illegal immigrants from around the world struggling to survive in a
foreign land. Two immigrants, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Senay (Audrey
Tautou) have formed an alliance of convenience as each works and scraps just
to survive day to day.

Such an existence is the heart of the film, the legend ads to the outrage of
their lives. Okwe is a doctor from Nigeria and Senay an independent woman
from Turkey dreaming of a life impossible to
reach in their homelands and painful to reach in their new homes. The pain
is exasperated when Okwe finds a human heart while working to unclog a
toilet in the hotel where he works. He soon discovers his hotel is the
illegal hospital for the human organ trade of London. Immigrants, desperate
to stay in London, are trading their organs for a new identity and a chance
at freedom.

Frears sculpts a world, teeming with the life of the fortunate. The
immigrants embrace this world as the answer to the misery of life in their
third world homes. The city on a hill mentality serves as the backdrop for
the harsh lives the immigrants embrace as the means to an end.

Frears’ London highlights the extent to which a third world misery reaches
around the world. Middle Eastern, African and Asians work together in the
film to help save or improve each other’s lives. The film is a bit
unbelievable in asking its audience to believe these people of such highly
different cultures would all work together to survive in a new land but it
does drive home the point that third world people around the globe face
enough of the same misery that they would risk everything to live as the
lowest cultural people in the western world.

Tautou, of “Amelie” fame, does a credible job in her first English-speaking
role. Perhaps her unfamiliarity with the language brings out a fear in her
portrayal of Senay. Senay comes across as sure of herself in private, but
in London’s public eye not quite sure how she will get through another day.

While Tautou got top billing for “Dirty Pretty Things,” it is Ejiofor who is
the lead actor and definite star of the film. He portrayed Okwe with a
reserved intelligence for a man forced to work demeaning jobs while keeping
his pride and morality in tact.

“Dirty Pretty Things” is a window into a world that has existed throughout
history. It reminds us that life around the world is harsh and that the
perceived glory of Western life is not a beautiful as we, or the downtrodden
around the globe, dream it to be.