By PETER CALDER
(Herald ratings: * * * *)
The hidden world of illegal immigrants is the setting of the new film by British director Frears which returns to the blistering, angry form of his 80s pictures like My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.
But this is no doctrinaire political tract. The scriptwriter, Steven Knight, who invented the television format Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, knows a thing or two about entertaining people and the finished film is intensely engrossing with a deeply satisfying denouement.
Unlike the quiz show's contestants, this film's protagonists have no dreams of wealth; they're fighting just to stay alive. Chief among them is Okwe (Ejiofor, a London stage sensation in his first starring film role). A Nigerian, he's a trained doctor who lives in the demi-monde of the illegals, renting the couch of Senay (Tautou, of Amelie fame), a Turkish woman whose immigration status is similarly shadowy.
Chewing a stimulant weed to stay awake, he double-shifts, driving a minicab by day and moonlighting as a porter at an East End hotel whose sleazy Spanish manager, Sneaky (the versatile Lopez), quickly emerges as the film's villain.
"They come in the night to do dirty things," Sneaky, who is given to whistling up his staff like dogs, tells Okwe of the hotel's patrons, "and it's our job to make them pretty again."
As part of his clean-up duties, Okwe attends to a blocked toilet in one of the dishevelled rooms and discovers the obstruction is a human heart. It's a development which seems implausibly grisly at first, even though it has an elegant symbolic value, but it's the beginning of a dark mystery thriller which mixes bleak comedy with acerbic political sensibility.
Fabled cinematographer Chris Menges, who shot The Killing Fields and The Mission, keeps the focus tight and claustrophobic; the film's characters move in a sealed world, shut off from the city beyond their brightly lit workplaces.
The film's sole false note is the pair of immigration agents, graceless snarling thugs who are studied caricatures. But Ejiofor's Okwe is the dramatic fulcrum and it's impossible to tear your eyes away from him. He distils into a nuanced portrait of ill-used dignity the whole hypocritical business of the employment black market. It's a brilliant performance in an excellent film.
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou, Sergi Lopez, Benedict Wong
Director: Stephen Frears
Running time: 98 mins
Rating: R16, (violence, sexual coercion).
Screening: Rialto
Dirty Pretty Things
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