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March 14, 2006

Dirty Pretty Things

Heartless Hotel

By Andrew

No One is Illegal (NOII) is a kick-ass immigrant rights group in Vancouver, British Columbia. While American liberals love to romanticize Canada (the Northern border seems to act as rose-tinted glasses), the need for NOII shows that our neighbor isn't much better than the US when it comes to immigration issues. A few weeks ago, NOII held a screening of Stephen Frear's Dirty Pretty Things. Seeing that NOII was showing the film, I made a point to see it myself.

I can easily see now why NOII would screen it. Set in London, the film portrays the difficult lives of non-status immigrants whose labor — their very livelihood — is against the law. I can also see why their advertisement carried the exclaimer, "The movie occasionally goes into sensationalistic territory, but does so in a low-key, non-exploitative manner."

Because it is fiction, the characters in Dirty Pretty Things are composites of larger populations; each one of them represents some of the terminal pains caused by colonial border policies. Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the film's main protagonist, is a cab driver by day and a hotel clerk by night. He is also a medical doctor, trained in his home country of Nigeria, but unable to practice where he doesn't have the requisite degrees and licenses. Senay Gelik (Audrey Tatou) is a Turkish migrant, a Muslim, and a legal resident due to asylum status. Her status, however, bans her from working, and she is forced to make a living illegally, first as a maid, and then as a seamstress. She is also Okwe's roommate and, thanks to the films penchant for a conventional plot, his love-interest too. Possibly due to this penchant for convention, the film's other major female character is a typical cinematic archetype, a streetwise prostitute named Juliette (Sophie Okonedo).

From beginning to end, Dirty Pretty Things continually bristles against its conservative plot conventions, and the resulting tension is what I think NOII meant by its "sensationalistic territory." The film starts as a thriller, but as the story's mystery is unraveled, the film becomes more of a battle against good and evil. In this way, the story the film tells is a lot like the laborers of the underground London economy whose lives it portrays. While deceptively simple, it exhibits levels of depth and meaning that are likely to be willfully unseen by the casual observer.

Dirty Pretty Things has a message about our modern capitalist economy, but that message is also a critique of the film itself. In one instance, Okwe's boss Sneaky (Sergi López) gives him a lecture on the hotel business. "The hotel business, he says, "is about strangers. And strangers will always surprise you, you know. 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." The hotel, as Sneaky describes it, could refer to host of things. It could be a metaphor for the Western industrialized countries, whose decadence depends on the foreign labor they defile with law. It could also refer to Dirty Pretty Things itself. The film doesn't flinch in presenting the brutal and violent everyday realities of a labor force without any semblance of political power ("dirty things"), but it presents it in a comfortable, major motion picture package ("pretty").

The combination of the dirty and the pretty makes this a moving movie, to be sure. But if it wasn't for the existence groups like NOII, who do the real on the ground work of organizing immigrants and non-status people, Dirty Pretty Things would have no direction to move us in. After all, Dirty Pretty Things tends to implicate one villain, Sneaky, as the source of most of the evilness it portrays on the screen, while NOII implicates the larger political systems that keep evil in place.

There might be more to this uncertainty about who is implicated than just my nagging political convictions. Oddly enough, the film was written by Steven Knight, creator of the primetime blockbuster "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Maybe Dirty Pretty Things is his way of atoning for that show's perpetuation of American meritocracy myths through its bait-and-switch suspense shtick. I suppose there's no real way for me to know.

I'm also unsure of how to interpret the dichotomy between the female leads, the wry prostitute named Juliette and the earnestly innocent Senay. The film itself admits this through Juliette, when she observes, "What a pair! The virgin and the whore." By the end of the film, it's been solidly established that neither of these women are as naïve as we might have originally led ourselves to believe, but the message the movie is sending here by establishing this dichotomy is unclear to me.

One thing is clear — it's so clear, I wear it on a tee shirt. NOII sells it as a fundraiser. On bright blue, the words NO ONE IS ILLEGAL bend over the top a human heart, outlined in red. Small letters across the center of the heart read "The system has no heart. It is just like a stone." Dirty Pretty Things has its own theory about the system's heart, and it's the most lasting image I took away from the film. Okwe goes into a hotel room to clean up, only to find a human heart backing up the toilet. From here, the thriller begins. Instead of being morbid, it is - really! - a hearty metaphor. Whether as stone or sewage, when it comes to immigration policies, our society's heart is conspicuously lacking.

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