Dirty Pretty things is a 2002 film that shows the story of a guy called Okwe who is a Nigerian doctor that has been falsely accused of a murder so he is forced to leave the country. Many of the characters that we see within the film are immigrants and people with important jobs that keep things running and these are the jobs that people tend to overlook such as taxi drivers and maids.
Ted Hovet describes this film as portraying a 'shady underworld of London' (Hovet, 2006) and this is true. The London that is represented within this film is dark and grimy. this film tries to show that there is a lot more to London that we tend not to see but it's to to say that the whole city is full of immigrants and drugs.
Okwe, the lead character remarks 'we are the people you do not see'. How true could this statement be? It gives some of the people we don't tend to see a voice. London is a background in a lot of films and it starts to get a bit repetitive. 'The city has been "over filmed ... so we were always trying to find bits of London that hadn't been in every other film"' (Hovet, 2006). The film takes us to the unknown and the unfamiliar, the places we know are there but tend not to see and this creates a very realistic representation of London.
Hovet, T. (2006). The invisible London of Dirty Pretty Things; or Dickens, Frears, and film today. Available: http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2006/hovet.html. last accessed 17th march 2015
Chloe O'Brien
Words - 243
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