London Underground
It’s a pleasure to behold a chunk of art that’s simultaneously dank and fresh, and that description perfectly fits the superb Dirty Pretty Things. The latest from veteran director Stephen Frears (Gumshoe, Prick Up Your Ears, High Fidelity) transports the viewer to a subjective inner landscape shaped by dub-funk, eerie fluorescent lighting, sticky streets and urban decay. The place is London, but it’s neither the travel-guide glossy version of the fabled city usually dished out in pop cinema nor the gothic wonderland of Victorian nightmare. Rather, this is an uncomfortable place in between, an earthly purgatory.
Like any cabbie, our hero, Nigerian taxi driver Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is not simply a cabbie. Sure, he’s also the night porter at the three-star Baltic Hotel, but there’s something else concealed behind his good-natured poker face. For a while, he manages to prevent his personal truths from bubbling up. “I am here to rescue those who’ve been let down by the system,” he announces to some stranded passengers. This may be the man’s creed in all things, but he’ll have to be strong and sharp enough to carry it through a daunting battery of tests.
Okwe’s primary challenge is catalyzed by Senay (Audrey Tautou, luminous), a dewy Turkish national toiling illegally as a maid at the Baltic. In a business arrangement that wouldn’t be lost on taxi drivers from Tokyo to Moscow, Okwe chastely rents Senay’s couch for a few restless hours between shifts. Unlike Okwe, however, Senay plays her cards face-up. Desperate to avoid becoming her traditionalist mother yet clinging to vestiges of an old religion that doesn’t fit her environment, she dreams of escaping to her fantasy vision of New York City. Their mutual respect and gentle appreciation soon blow their cover, transforming them both into fugitives on the lam from immigration goons.
Frears has assembled an unforgettable cast. All the leads are displaced persons, in keeping with the current face of London or of any metropolis. At the Baltic, the cheekily named Juliette (Sophie Okonedo, fabulous) is both local girl and working girl; she’s a night creature, an invisible outsider. In the year’s heartiest act of cinematic symbolism, she leads Okwe to something blocking a toilet in one of the rooms — which turns out to be an item most people need in order to survive. The discovery is lost on the Russian doorman, Ivan (Zlatko Buric), but it causes the hotel’s greaseball manager, Señor Juan (Sergi Lopez, muy astuto), to sniff out Okwe’s origins, leading to very difficult choices for the intrepid aliens. Without blowing too much, let’s just say the movie is gutsy.
Dirty Pretty Things may lure you in with its coy title or the promise of more glamour from the international star of Amélie, but it’s best appraised as a strong ensemble piece, a darkly dreamy slab of social commentary that’s one of the year’s finest films. (It’s also the best love story I’ve seen so far this year.) The nervous-immigrant theme puts it proudly alongside recent successes like Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People and Paul Pavlikovsky’s Last Resort.
It’s tempting to take screenwriter Steve Knight (cocreator of broad entertainment like TV’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire) to task for his stridently old-fashioned characterizations — guileless heroes, nasty villains. And for a Stephen Frears film, there is a stark absence of ambiguity here. But it works. Ejiofor’s face is a symphony of loss and longing, and Tautou succeeds with not only her cathartic whirling dervish but also her ambitious accent — in a foreign tongue, no less. She registers the sentiments of one who’s truly forlorn, and not simply in a cute, crowd-pleasing way. Frears wisely guides these would-be lovers as they shepherd us through their personal underworld.
