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The Best of British Cinema: ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ (2002)
Stephen Frears’ mis-marketed thriller/immigrant melodrama balances thrilling immersion with humanity and tenderness
For many years, the vast majority of films whose main characters were immigrants were melodramatic. A great example for this is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s great German film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), a remake of Douglas Sirk’s also brilliant melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955), which takes the social dilemma of an age gap in a relationship from its predecessor and moulds it into one about an older, German woman dating a younger Moroccan man. That film sees the warmth of their gentle, passionate but secure romance pitted against the coldness of other people who react to the couple as though they were a disturbing circus act. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort, a film I plan to discuss for this column eventually, is similar — it details a romance between the Russian immigrant Tanya and a kindly British seaside amusements owner, this time with less of a violent reaction from people the couple know.
It is rare for a film about immigrants to shift far beyond the drama or romance genre, tending to stick to having an immigrant character be physically matched with somebody from their new country in a narrative metaphor for their…
