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DIRTY PRETTY THINGS (green)
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London, I have read (and am prepared to believe), has the world's most expensive hotels … and though none of the workers are native, English is what they speak, with their guests and with one another.
Night auditor Okwe (Chewitil Ejiofor, AMISTAD) drives a cab and is night desk auditor at the tony Baltic Hotel; in between gigs he chews something like coca leaves to stay awake, and crashes on the couch of chambermaid S¸enay (Andrey Tautou, AMELIE), a cleaning maid seeking asylum (from Turkey? well, it's a movie) and dodging the thuggish greasy INS agents (second-generation caricatures, yeah, yeah, we get it) who root through her flat and stalk the hotel's staff entrance. Okwe lives the negative of our existence: rising when others sleep, sleeping when others rise, and so he (and by extension, we the audience) observes what others do not: Sneaky Juan (Sergi Lopez), house manager and cock of the walk, running a dozen fiddles simultaneously, whore Juliette (Sophie Okonedo), who gives doorman Ivan (Zlatko Buric) five minutes' breathless romp in exchange for his blind eye.
Until, of course, Okwe fishes a clue – an excised human heart – from the clogged toilet in Room 510 …
Were this simply a thriller, we would find its adaptive reuse of standard tropes pedestrian, but director Stephen Frears (MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, THE COMMITMENTS) is more interested in mystery-as-travelogue, taking us through backstairs London, which he makes a multicultural wonderland of neon and night. The sole Anglo character – so white-faced he might be albino – barely speaks, and then only to confirm that however much he will not associate with the invisible help, he depends upon them for his own wealth.
If its symbolism is too overt (repeated references to male sexuality as evidence of corrupt domination), its resolution of redemption both too-pat and telegraphed, this understated but not underplotted story is lightly staged, seductively filmed, and beautifully acted (did Frears appreciate the irony of hiring foreign actors playing foreigners in English they heavily accent but persuasively inflect?). DIRTY PRETTY THINGS gently draws us in to a world that we know is always just out of our sight.