FilmBlather.com

"They come here at night and do dirty things. And in the morning, it's our job to make them pretty again."

Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things seems to reveal a gruesome and outlandish side of the London immigrant experience. I'm not sure I believe it, but I like the spirit in which the film is made, and more importantly, the characters who populate it. Even the ubiquitous Audrey Tautou, typically such a grating personality, is granted a role that earns our sympathy and admiration. By the end, I was convinced that even if the situations they really face isn't quite so cinematic, these people exist, and they may be something like this.

One of the protagonist's first lines, spoken as taxi driver to potential airport passenger, is "I'm not here to meet you in particular, but I'm hear to rescue those who have been let down by the system." That's about right. He is Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a doctor from Africa who has illegally traveled to London to work days as a taxi driver and nights as a front desk clerk in a hotel, taking pick-me-up herbs to keep him awake. He makes a temporary home in the small apartment belonging to Senay (Tautou), a Turkish refugee who is not permitted to work, but works anyway, and when Immigration comes after her, Okwe is forced to high-tail it outta there.

Why has this intelligent, educated man left his life and family on a different continent to come to London and suffer? I'm not telling, and it's more complicated than you think anyway. A little naivete and a lot of goodwill gets Okwe embroiled in a scheme by the hotel manager (Sergi Lopez) to sell excellent fake passports to desperate immigrants for the price of one (1) kidney each. You see, the perpetrator needs someone with medical experience to perform the impromptu hotel room surgery, and Okwe happens to be a doctor with some access to local hospital facilities. They're a match made in heaven, if it wasn't for pesky things like Okwe's scruples.

This is a bizarre melange of over-the-top almost-comedy and tender, sometimes heartbreaking character moments. The end result, however, is nothing if not coherent. We get to know these people, and we get to know the city they inhabit as well, or at least Frears' vision thereof. He builds a fictional sense of place; his (and screenwriter Steve Knight's) vision may or may not actually reflect reality, but it sure is emotionally convincing.

Aside from the two protagonists and the villain, Dirty Pretty Things has a number of richly defined supporting players, all of them representing a different way people deal with the hardships of immigrant life. Okwe's friend Guo Yi (the very interesting Benedict Wong) shuts himself off in a hospital morgue; the hotel doorman (Zlatco Burik) bides his time between visits with a local prostitute (Sophie Okonedo), who is perpetually in high spirits. The owner of a sweatshop to which Senay eventually resorts, insists on being serviced by the virginal young women, under penalty of being reported to immigration authorities.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the African-born actor each of whose movies has been in English, does an admirable job stringing the film together as well as accomplishing the difficult feat of crafting a sympathetic enigma. I've been growing increasingly weary of Audrey Tautou but, ironically, her first role in English is her best. And Benedict Wong is a discovery who, mark my words, will come back to us in a big way.

This is not at all an unusual project for veteran director Frears, whose last project dealt with an Irish family that suddenly plunges into poverty during the Depression. He handles this material with elegance, and a certain beauty, too; the beauty of the people whom society has left for dead.