Among the 18 non-documentary films that I saw at last year's Toronto Film Festival, this new Stephen Frears offering was my favorite. It isn't often that a cutting-edge foreign director who's taken a dip in Hollywood waters can ever recapture the style and flair that got him noticed by Hollywood in the first place, but it would seem that French actress Audrey Tatou is a good-luck charm for a director attempting to perform such a feat. 2001 festival winner AMELIE resurrected Jean-Pierre Jeunet from the wreckage of ALIEN RESURRECTION, and now, DIRTY PRETTY THINGS makes for a supremely satisfying return to Frears' glory year of 1987, when he came out with the `real London' back-to-back art house successes that were SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID and PRICK UP YOUR EARS. Frears was honored with a retrospective at the festival in 2000, and if tributes like these can provoke similar return-to-form efforts from other directors ... I can sure suggest some names!
I have only two minor cavils with the film. One is with Tatou being cast as an illegally-working Turkish immigrant in London. Only the most culturally-illiterate of viewers could ever buy her as being Turkish (she only makes a token effort at the accent). But once you get past this minor annoyance, her performance is otherwise excellent and a savvy career choice. (Nothing like a trip to all-too-real London to avoid becoming over-identified with fantasyland Paris!) The other is with the morality of the lead character, a former Nigerian doctor known only as `Okwe,' who's on the lam from a crime he was framed for after his medical ethics clashed with the wishes of state authorities. It's a great, compelling performance from unknown-in-America Chiwetel Ejiofor -- one that's sure to bring him plenty of North American roles - but in retrospect, his character is just a little TOO morally upstanding to be fully credible.
The film deals with a compelling subject - the hand-to-mouth existence eked out by the huge numbers of illegal immigrants (and illegally-working immigrants) who do all of the bottom-rung work that nobody else wants to do in a teeming western metropolis. Okwe has two jobs that leave him next to no time for any kind of personal life -- a daytime cab driver and graveyard shift hotel night porter. He tries to resist letting anyone know that he's really a doctor, but his cab boss knows, and this forces him to maintain some low-level ties to the medical community. Later, some detective work at the hotel leads to him discovering a black-market operation in human organs being run by his hotel boss.
As you can probably surmise, another painful medical moment of truth looms in the doctor's future following this discovery. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you've ever been disappointed by a film where the payoff wasn't worthy of the setup (and who hasn't?), you can rest assured that DIRTY PRETTY THINGS is definitely NOT one of these cases. The final stages of the story arc are VERY reminiscent of a certain Hollywood classic, but I'll leave it to the professional critics to do the spoiling.
The casting of the movie is superb ... the first question from the audience for Frears following the screening was `Where did you get all of those fantastic actors?' Normally, such generic audience questions elicit groans, but in THIS case, it seemed like a perfectly legitimate inquiry. Besides Ejiofor and Tatou, there's also Sergi Lopez in his first English language role (following previous French festival hits AN AFFAIR OF LOVE and WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY) as Okwe's hotel boss. Oozing the kind of ersatz charm that you love to hate, he's great as a scoundrel who's convinced himself that he's doing everyone involved in his racket a favor. Supporting players Sophie Oknonedo as a prostitute doing regular business at the hotel and Benedict Wong as Okwe's mortician friend provide some great comic relief to the often grim and tense proceedings. Add in more colorful extras than you'd find in a Guy Ritchie movie (with BRITISH Brits existing strictly as peripheral characters) to flesh out Steve Knight's great script and you've got a crowd-pleasing winner.
The presence of the Miramax banner put me on high `tampering alert' when watching the movie, but all I saw was vintage Frears. And he claimed during the Q&A that this is HIS movie ... `any mistakes you see on the screen are mine' were his words. The film was well-placed in the `Masters' Program at the festival and is one to definitely be looking for in commercial release. It SCREAMS for a Hispanic American remake . much more so than EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN ever did.
I have only two minor cavils with the film. One is with Tatou being cast as an illegally-working Turkish immigrant in London. Only the most culturally-illiterate of viewers could ever buy her as being Turkish (she only makes a token effort at the accent). But once you get past this minor annoyance, her performance is otherwise excellent and a savvy career choice. (Nothing like a trip to all-too-real London to avoid becoming over-identified with fantasyland Paris!) The other is with the morality of the lead character, a former Nigerian doctor known only as `Okwe,' who's on the lam from a crime he was framed for after his medical ethics clashed with the wishes of state authorities. It's a great, compelling performance from unknown-in-America Chiwetel Ejiofor -- one that's sure to bring him plenty of North American roles - but in retrospect, his character is just a little TOO morally upstanding to be fully credible.
The film deals with a compelling subject - the hand-to-mouth existence eked out by the huge numbers of illegal immigrants (and illegally-working immigrants) who do all of the bottom-rung work that nobody else wants to do in a teeming western metropolis. Okwe has two jobs that leave him next to no time for any kind of personal life -- a daytime cab driver and graveyard shift hotel night porter. He tries to resist letting anyone know that he's really a doctor, but his cab boss knows, and this forces him to maintain some low-level ties to the medical community. Later, some detective work at the hotel leads to him discovering a black-market operation in human organs being run by his hotel boss.
As you can probably surmise, another painful medical moment of truth looms in the doctor's future following this discovery. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you've ever been disappointed by a film where the payoff wasn't worthy of the setup (and who hasn't?), you can rest assured that DIRTY PRETTY THINGS is definitely NOT one of these cases. The final stages of the story arc are VERY reminiscent of a certain Hollywood classic, but I'll leave it to the professional critics to do the spoiling.
The casting of the movie is superb ... the first question from the audience for Frears following the screening was `Where did you get all of those fantastic actors?' Normally, such generic audience questions elicit groans, but in THIS case, it seemed like a perfectly legitimate inquiry. Besides Ejiofor and Tatou, there's also Sergi Lopez in his first English language role (following previous French festival hits AN AFFAIR OF LOVE and WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY) as Okwe's hotel boss. Oozing the kind of ersatz charm that you love to hate, he's great as a scoundrel who's convinced himself that he's doing everyone involved in his racket a favor. Supporting players Sophie Oknonedo as a prostitute doing regular business at the hotel and Benedict Wong as Okwe's mortician friend provide some great comic relief to the often grim and tense proceedings. Add in more colorful extras than you'd find in a Guy Ritchie movie (with BRITISH Brits existing strictly as peripheral characters) to flesh out Steve Knight's great script and you've got a crowd-pleasing winner.
The presence of the Miramax banner put me on high `tampering alert' when watching the movie, but all I saw was vintage Frears. And he claimed during the Q&A that this is HIS movie ... `any mistakes you see on the screen are mine' were his words. The film was well-placed in the `Masters' Program at the festival and is one to definitely be looking for in commercial release. It SCREAMS for a Hispanic American remake . much more so than EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN ever did.