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There have been a number of films made in Britain about ethnic minorities; "Anita and Me", "Bhaji on the Beach", "Sour Sweet" and "Bend it Like Beckham" are all examples that come to mind. Most of these films, however, deal with those who migrated legally to Britain in the mid twentieth century and their descendants who, while retaining a distinct cultural identity of their own, have integrated into British society."Dirty Pretty Things" ventures into much less familiar territory, the world of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Although some reviewers have confused these two categories of people, they are in fact different. An asylum seeker has the right to remain in Britain while his or her case is being investigated by the authorities. An illegal immigrant has no legal right to be in Britain at all. What both groups have in common, however, is that neither are legally permitted to work, and are frequently exploited by unscrupulous employers who employ them illegally, generally in poor conditions and for less than the legal minimum wage.The central character is Okwe, an African working as a cab driver during the day and as a hotel porter at night. In the course of the film we learn that his real name is Olesegun, that he was a doctor in Nigeria and that he was forced to flee that country as a political refugee. Okwe shares a flat with a young Turkish woman named Senay who fled her country to avoid an arranged marriage. Although Senay has fallen in love with Okwe, the relationship between them remains platonic. Like Okwe, Senay is forced to work illegally, in her case in a sweatshop garment factory, where she is not only exploited financially by her bosses but is also sexually harassed by the foreman, who is safe in the knowledge that she will not dare to report him to the authorities.The plot has some similarities with that of medical thrillers such as "Coma" and "Extreme Measures". One night Okwe is called to attend to a blocked lavatory in a hotel room and discovers that what is causing the blockage is actually a human heart. His investigations into this discovery lead him to uncover a black-market trade in human body parts for transplant surgery and to the knowledge that his boss Juan, the hotel night manager, is involved in this traffic. Like Okwe and Senay, Juan is an immigrant, presumably from Spain or Latin America. Most of the characters in the film, in fact, are either immigrants or from minority communities; we also see a West Indian prostitute and a Chinese morgue worker. Apart from the bullying immigration officers, we see little of the native British community.It is difficult to envisage a film like this being made in America, at least by a mainstream company. If Hollywood ever makes a film about the lives of immigrant hotel workers, it does so in the context of a glossy romantic comedy like "Maid in Manhattan". The British film industry, however, has a long tradition of social realism, a tradition that was particularly strong in the fifties and sixties, the heyday of the "kitchen sink" movie, although it has occasionally been revived since, especially during the Thatcherite era. ("My Beautiful Laundrette", another Stephen Frears film with a hero drawn from an ethnic minority, was an example from the mid-eighties).There are two acting performances that stand out. One is from Chiwetel Ejiofor as Okwe, a modern incarnation of that classic type of thriller hero (one beloved of Alfred Hitchcock), the decent man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other is from Sergi Lopez as the creepy, slimy Juan, a man whose nickname of "Sneaky" is well-deserved. Audrey Tautou, however, was something of a disappointment after her excellent role in "Amelie"; like a number of other actors, she seems to find it easier to act in her own language than in a foreign one.What gives this film its power is this combination of documentary-style social realism with a gripping thriller plot. (There is a third element, the growing romance between Okwe and Senay, the British cinema being more relaxed than the American one about inter-racial romance). In the past, I have not always been Frears's greatest admirer; I found "Laundrette", for example overrated, and he has turned out some fairly standard Hollywood fare. "The Queen" was a good film, but even that was only lifted above the average by an excellent performance from Helen Mirren. "Dirty Pretty Things", however, is the best of his films that I have seen, a fine example of the honourable British tradition of casting light on those aspects of our society that Middle England might prefer to keep in the dark. 8/10
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