dirty pretty things (2003)
			director:  stephen frears audrey tautou, sergi lopez sophie okonedo, benedict wong zlatko buric unfashionable observations rating: D				Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things is a movie that is everywhere and nowhere all at once.  While this may sound like a good thing at first, it is not.  There is no focus to the film on account of its bifurcated story line.  On the one hand, we have the story of how a night porter at a posh London hotel (Ejiofor) mysteriously finds a human heart lodged in the toilet of one of the rooms.  Intriguing as this sounds, the movie then trails off into other matters that have nothing to do with the heart.  We learn that this same night porter is an illegal Nigerian immigrant who leads a life of unrest and paranoia, always running and hiding from the police for fear of being deported or jailed.  So not only do we get a movie about a creepy heart, but we also get a lesson on the unfortunate realities of immigration in Europe.  Oh and by the way, there’s also another story about how this same night porter endangers the life of his love—a Turkish chambermaid (Tautou)—by staying with her at night.  So it’s a love story as well. This movie suffers from being stretched too thin.  There have been many movies made with differing plot lines that end up coalescing neatly in the end (Pulp Fiction, Go, The Rules of Attraction, Amores Perros).  But those movies worked because they all had a unifying theme to each of the stories.  They’re good movies not because the stories come together in the end, but because they do so naturally and effortlessly.  This is not the case with Stephen Frears' unfortunate film. Indeed, by the end of the film, when everything is supposed to come together, I found myself in a state of utter disbelief.  The story was simply implausible, and all-too convenient.  When the Turkish chambermaid agrees to sell her kidney to go to New York, I was already looking around the theatre to see if anyone else found the story to be as bizarre as it was wholly unconvincing.  If Stephen Frears wanted to make a horror movie, he should have done a horror movie.  This is not it.  If he wanted to make a docu-drama about the horrors of immigration, then he should have done a docu-drama about the horrors of immigration.  This is not it.  If he wanted instead to make another Casablanca, then he should have done a romance.  This movie is not it.  In the end, we find that Dirty Pretty Things is so segmented and schizophrenic that we cannot see the forest for the trees. And I didn’t even mention the Chinese prostitute. I’d give Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things a D.
	Unfashionable Observations © 2003