Political and social matters gets tossed aside for fairytale ending.
In Stephen Frears newest film, the city of London known for a place fit for a Queen and recognized to tourists for Big Ben and a network of trains called the underground is set as a seedy underworld and a revolving door of illegal and morally questionable activity, not any different from any other big city of the world. Thriving on the miserable outcome of underclass immigrants, there are people who use the system to favor their dirty businesses.
Dirty Pretty Things takes an inside look of such workings and discovers that there are plenty of people who are invisible on the surface but are very much there when a toilette needs to be unblocked or if a person needs some sexual gratification. This film pairs off two such passengers on a ride from agony with a former doctor from an African nation working as a cab driver and as a hotel clerk Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor Amistad) working hard to make ends meet with a girl a Muslim Turk who he ends up liking and helping to get out of a life of misery and to the land of the Big Apple. Audrey Tautou (L’Auberge Espagnole) as Senay drops her Amelie glow for a trouble girl who is hardly convincing in her first English role where she doesn’t quite handle the pretend you are a Turk speaking bad English aspect of the character but looks good with shaving cream on her female moustache. The evil antagonist (Sergi Lopez Jet Lag), the hotel manager whose got a side business is perhaps to exaggerated as a bad guy, with the real threat being from the environments of the underworld and not that one figure.
Frears throws us into an anxiety friendly world where there is a zero sense of security and not enough sleep, it is certainly an interesting subject matter, however would have been better suited by a better treatment of the events as such the case for the exaggeration of the toilette bowl discovery would have been better with leads ups that question the whole give an organ receive a passport trade, perhaps with bloody sheets and missing guests as first clues. What works especially well for this picture are the locations, the tight spaces, the Baltic hotel, the floor of the hospital that the public doesn’t know exists and the odd space in the sweatshop where Senay gets cornered between finished hanging clothes.
Cinematographer Chris Menges who gave a vividness to nights in Montecarlo with The Good Thief makes capturing such images look easy as he literally frames weird looking locales with a quasi fluorescent like touch which gives off a true notion of the underworld’s creepiness. Unfortunately,
