Despite dramatic shortcomings, Stephen Frears’ new film Dirty
Pretty Things is an incredibly gripping look at the entrapment
and exploitation of illegal immigrants working underground and
living in fear of deportation. Until its last moments, this story
of London’s black market is a riveting one, beginning as a mystery
and building into a lesson in the battle between doing what is
right and doing what must be done.

“You will learn the hotel business is about strangers, and
strangers will always surprise you,” Senior Juan (Sergi Lopez),
manager of the Baltic Hotel, tells his night-shift desk worker,
Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor). “They come to hotels in the night to do
dirty things. And in the morning it’s our job to make things look
pretty again.”

Moments earlier Okwe had presented Juan with a bag containing a
human heart he found clogging a toilet in the hotel. Okwe’s
Nigerian accent beautifully underlines the compassion in his voice
when he tells Juan, “It is a heart. A human heart.”

Okwe’s is the voice of humanity and civility–both of which fly
in the face of Juan, a black market businessman with grease-slicked
hair and a confident, broad-shouldered stride. Juan epitomizes the
London underground: unrestrained by laws and accustomed to getting
anything he wants, so long as he has the cash.

Like everyone else employing illegal immigrants in London, Juan
need only pick up a phone to destroy the life Okwe has been trying
to make for himself after his tumultuous flight from his homeland.
This is the pressure under which Okwe and his Turkish
roommate/co-worker Senay (Audrey Tautou) will either bend or
break.

Of course, everyone first tries to bend. But as Okwe’s friend
Guoyi (Benedict Wong), a night-shift mortician at a hospital, tells
him, “There is nothing so dangerous as a virtuous man.”

Indeed, what makes this film increasingly hard to watch is
Okwe’s deterioration from a quick, cool man who works two jobs and
artfully weaves–and sometimes cons– his way through the layers of
society to a sleep-deprived burnout (he is able to maintain his
hectic schedule only by chewing uppers–but they soon take their
toll) who, until the gritty end, only has enough strength for his
own survival.

While picking up strangers at the airport he says, “I am not
here to meet you in particular. I am here to rescue those let down
by the system.” In true Hippocratic style, Okwe, who was a doctor
in Nigeria, acts only to help people in need, treating their wounds
and providing them black market drugs.

Senay quickly becomes the object of Okwe’s protection. With a
comforting progress, Senay, who begins as a shy Muslim woman
(although Tautou’s tentative English is infused more with her
native French accent than her affected Arabic–and she really
doesn’t look Turkish, while we’re at it) breaks free from her
anxiety and warms up to Okwe, who until then had simply been
sleeping on Senay’s couch when she was at work.

Screenwriter Steve Knight’s plot moves with the grace and
simplicity of a stage play, tracing Okwe and Senay from tentative
acquaintances to fellow survivors to near-lovers. The beauty of
their relationship and the dreams they share (Senay wants to move
to New York, Okwe wants to return home) is what makes their
exploitation so horrible.

Senay is forced to perform sexual favors for her sweatshop boss
after she loses her hotel job, and Okwe finds himself picking up
the pieces after Juan performs low-quality, black-market organ
removals on immigrants in exchange for visas and new
identities.

Justice is eventually served–and sweetly so–but the aftermath,
although in line with the Darwinian survival-driven world Okwe and
Senay are attempting to escape, is emotionally unfulfilling and, in
short, hard to believe. Then again, maybe dreams were only meant to
come true one at a time.