Dirty Pretty Things. Directed by Steven Frears. UK release date: 13 December. US release scheduled for April 2003. Rating: ★★★★
This gritty British film centres on a hotel night porter who finds a human heart blocking the toilet in one of the guest rooms. The story builds up a complex and desperate picture of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom.
Okwe (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Nigerian doctor working in London (as a taxi driver by day and a hotel porter by night). He doesn't like to sleep and grinds away in a daily quest for survival. He lives, secretly, with Saney (Audrey Tautou), a Turkish woman who has been granted asylum.
Screen writer Steven Knight's story is based around the “business of strangers” in hotels and the contrast between the privileged lifestyle of the guests and the alarming goings on behind doors marked “staff only.” When Okwe finds the human heart, he eventually uncovers a market in illegal human organs.
The hotel proprietor is the creepy Juan, who makes his fortune out of the misery of desperate people. He trades a kidney for £10 000, keeping the money for himself, and giving the donor a passport. The lure of a new identity means that Juan has no shortage of people willing to undergo such drastic surgery within the hotel. And as with all surgery, sometimes it goes wrong—hence Okwe's discovery of the heart.
Knight wrote the film not to beat the drum about asylum seekers but to expose a world that is, for the most part, completely alien to the rest of us—the world of cleaners, minicab drivers, and factory shift workers. Dirty Pretty Things poignantly portrays a London that is normally invisible to most of us going about our daily lives—a world where people live outside the law, without decent housing, and are unable to use services such as the police and health care that the rest of us take for granted. This becomes acute when Okwe cannot report his discovery of the heart for fear of being deported. For similar reasons, the kidney donors left with systemic and life threatening sepsis as a result of shoddy surgery feel that they cannot go to hospital.
Despite the occasional surfacing scandal, the illegal trade in human organs is often dismissed as apocryphal. While a film can offer no proof, Dirty Pretty Things portrays such a divided society that the idea of sacrificing the poor and dispossessed to provide life for the rich, in the form of organs, seems entirely credible.
This film, which opened the London Film Festival, made me feel differently about the world around me. The tabloid media and governments in the West would do well to sit up and notice it.
Figure.
IMAGE.NET
The secret life of asylum seekers: Ejiofor and Tautou in Dirty Pretty Things