Dirty Pretty Things

This is an example of a very good movie that was not promoted properly. This look at the underbelly of modern London is fascinating. In "Dirty Pretty Things" the viewer is taken beneath the usual staid and proper face of the city to its dirty tenements and nasty underworld. And we're not invited into a lower-class colorful Cockney world.Instead, we are shown into a world teeming with immigrants, legal and illegal, from all over the world, trying to survive in a brutal world without mercy for the defenseless. It is a world filled with sweatshops you would expect to see in a third world country, prostitutes, and predators of every stripe.The legal immigrant is Senay, a Turkish Muslim played by the lovely Audrey Tautou. She displays the wide range of her acting talent in a role quite different fron the whimsical pixie she portayed in "Amelie". She is a housekeeper in the aptly named Baltic Hotel.Her counterpart is Okwe, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, a former doctor who is now a taxi driver and night desk clerk at the same hotel where Senay works and is allowed to sleep on her couch when she is not there. I don't know where they found Chitwetel Ejiofor, but he has star potential. He actually steals this movie in my opinion, even with an outstanding performance by Tautou.The two of them are thrown together by happenstance. Each is preyed upon by the type of vultures that haunt a large city's underbelly. Senay is sexually exploited by a sweatshop owner. Okwe is exploited by Sneaky Juan the kind of underworld denizen always working an angle at some vulnerable immigrant's expense. He co-opts Okwe into using his medical skill for an outrageously immoral scheme in exchange for fake passports for Okwe and Senay. After their experience in the London underworld these two immigrants want to emigrate.The satisfying irony of how Okwe obtains the passports from Sneaky Juan, and then turns the tables on him, is worth the price of admission itself. It involves a very clever plot twist. The movie has a bittersweet ending but that is hardly a negative for this gem. Very nicely done and well worth seeing. With wider distribution this could have been a foreign film winner.

I love Audrey Tautou and this sounded like an intriguing and suspenseful movie. It was all that, but so much more. It's the story of immigrants and how people take advantage of them. Audrey Tautou and Chiwetel Ejiofor play the main characters, doing whatever they have to to get by. In their world you have to sell some of your own soul to exist. The hotel where both of them have jobs (one of several) there is an illegal human organ trade going on. Human trafficking in several forms goes on and you wonder what you would do if you were in those same circumstances. The main male character, who is so upstanding, yet even he succumbs at times in order to survive, doing things like borrowing customers shoes at the hotel, etc. Other immigrants sell their organs to obtain money and a new passport and new identity. Everything is for sale. But it also shows a tight community where the immigrants look out for each other while they hope for something more. The main male character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor is a man of honor, constantly torn between what he must do to survive. But in his little illegal world people know they can count of him as he is a doctor from Nigeria, and works hard and grapples with his scruples.In the midst of all of it is a sweet love story. Audrey Tautou is wonderful in this role and the story between the two main characters is love in a hard world.Very good movie.

Dirty Pretty Things was at once a pleasant surprise and a slight disappointment. It stands head and shoulders above the wreckage of most recent Britflicks, but it still never quite reaches the heights. Part of the problem is that the background is the story, leaving us with an at times slight narrative and a very predictable final twist that seems very much like one of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Very Much as We Expected (the moment Chiwetel Ejiofor stops Sergi Lopez's hands from shaking you know exactly what's coming).That said, it's still a worthwhile trip. Unlike most British films, and London ones in particular, it actually uses the city as a character - in this case the hidden city. We see virtually no ordinary British citizens. Instead the film is inhabited by the illegal immigrants who do the dirty jobs that no-one else wants, the lead character a Nigerian doctor who works double-shifts as taxi driver and hotel porter and rents a couch in Turkish maid Audrey Tatou's couch on a timeshare basis. This milieu is superbly captured, and you get a sense of a world not so much hidden as ignored. Frears direction too is back to the power and drive of his early work after his recent flabby American entries, although he still can't resist caricaturing the Immigration officials - rather than the bored, disinterested and impersonal reality he's opted for cheap comic book villains that diminishes every scene they appear in. Similarly, he doesn't always keep a tight enough rein on some of the supporting performances, Sophie Okenedo in particular: she can be a much better actress, but here she's allowed to veer too much to stereotype and has a couple of awkward moments. Lopez too falls back on some of his overfamiliar mannerisms, although Ejiofor is quite superb in the lead, and his easygoing scenes with Benedict Wong's mortuary waste disposal technician are minor highlights.Nonetheless, with most British cinema so awful these days, this is definitely worth catching: a very good film even if it could have been even better.The DVD transfer is fine but the extras are negligible - a brief featurette and a commentary with lots of dead air from Stephen Frears.

The topic was a surprise and hard to accept. But the movie handled it in a masterful way. A mixture of suspense action/adventure and a sprinkle of romance. The movie "unfolds" revealing a message about racial inequality, financial disparity and universal humanity wrapped up in a highly entertaining movie! Thumbs up! 👍🏾

There is a lot that is good about this: showing the plight of iilegal immigrants, the terrible conditions in which some people have to live in London, unnoticed by most other people, a tightly worked plot, much good characterisation and acting, notably from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Toutou. They are both moving, living desperately on the edge: he as a Nigerian doctor who now works as a hotel night porter and taxi driver, both full time, it seems; she as a chambermaid at the same hotel, under the unscrupulous manager. Other characters, all of non-white ethnicities, are struggling to survive, and come across vividly. The film is very well shot - full of colour, and edgy, although the plot becomes so horrifying one is less able to take any pleasure in this. For me, it became too off-putting when it became clear this was going to be about the illegal organ trade. I couldn't find much information on Wikipedia about how much of this actually goes on, but I assume that in London the scenario we are shown is rare. It is used here in a setup that has thriller and vaguely comic elements, jarring somewhat. As I say, there is a lot that is affecting in the human interactions, but the tone is not handled as well as in My Beautiful Laundrette, made by Frears 17 years before. For all its violence, the 80s vision of London doesn't lurch into the nightmare scenario presented here, and feels closer to reality, less on the verge of being a thriller.

Oh London, built up on the rewards of conquest, slavery and empire, then upon the sheer power of its services, sprouting a skyline of pure wealth. And underneath this gloss, in the underbelly, the exploited, abused workers making it tick and run. Migrants in desperate need to live, to just survive, to send money back home. Would you do any different.Chiwetel Ejiofor is magnificent (as usual) with a presence that screams I want to rise beyond this dirt and grime. Audrey Tatou does a beautiful rendition of a desperate and sensitive soul. Their chemistry is strong, is this how two lost people find something? Whoever cast them together should do so again, please!The song "Tiny Tears make up an ocean" by Tindersticks should have been the sound-track to this desolate bitter-sweet movie of utter melancholia.

This thriller has more loose ends than a rasta's dreadlocks. Item, someone dies while undergoing an illegal kidney transplant and so they cut out the person's heart and shove it down the toilet where it gets stuck in the U-tube. Really, I ask you. The first rule of crime stories is they should be plausible.

Brilliant movie about the multi-cultural pitt....erm sorry i meant paradise i live in -London. Brilliant story, fantastic acting, and well directed by the talented director. This really is brave movie-making. If you think Albert Square (Eastenders) is a fair depiction of multicultural London, then don't bother with this fine movie.Selah

A great story.. With mind- broadening aspects of the lives of immigrants trying to survive in the frail freedom afforded in the western culture they have escaped to.. In contrast to the oppression they escaped from...