Last Thursday we wanted to express solidarity with our neighbors to the north stuck in the blackout, so we decided also to spend the evening in the dark & thus went to the movies. Dirty Pretty Things is an interesting, if imperfect, film, because it’s built around three primary narrative frames. On one hand, this portrait of a Nigerian cabbie who also works the graveyard shift at the desk in a second-tier hotel is a neorealist account of the lives of illegal & quasi-legal immigrants in London. On a second level, the film is a noir thriller that gets off to a running start with an homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation as the hotel clerk discovers what’s plugging up the toilet in room 510. On a third level, one that doesn’t become fully apparent until the final 20 minutes of the picture, Dirty Pretty Things is also a fairy tale.

 

One could argue, I suppose, that there is a fourth one as well, a romance, particularly as the film’s marketing has paid so much attention to the presence of Audrey Tautou, the current It Girl of French cinema following her breakthrough title role in the comedy Amélie. But it’s really Chiwetel Ejiofor who is at the heart of this actor-centered film, a London-raised performer with Nigerian parents best known in the U.S. for the modest role of Ensign Covey in Spielberg’s Amistad. All of these different structures have to integrate themselves & make sense in Ejiofor’s face, with eyes & mouth every bit as expressive as Tautou’s (which is saying something – she’s getting the roles that a generation ago would have been given to Giulietta Masina).

 

This is rather a lot to expect from a film whose writer is best known for having created Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And it’s risky, in that someone who is attracted to neorealism or noir is not necessarily the obvious audience for a fairy tale. Some of the reviews have faulted the film for stepping back from the horrific conclusion toward which the thriller appears to be headed. Yet anyone who remembers director Stephen Frears’ early films, My Beautiful Laundrette or Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, will realize that it is the fairy tale that Frears set out tell in the first place.

 

Narrative cinema is interesting not because Hollywood’s imperialism has denuded the film industries of numerous countries, beginning with our own, but because, when done well, cinema is so efficient with the deployment of narrative devices. The relationship between ensembles of these devices to genre forms is often fascinating to watch – genre is all about expectation – and film’s ability to link these has removed many, tho not all, of the social contexts once reserved for the novel.

 

I think of Zukofsky’s dictum that love is to reason as eyes are to the mind and wonder how that fits into this equation. “Eyes” is in fact the privileged term in Zukofsky’s long critical work Bottom: On Shakespeare, so much so that the index of the Ark Press edition* lists it thus:

 

eye(s), passim, 9-443

 

And Zukofsky, it should be remembered, also published a suite of shorter poems under the title I’s (pronounced eyes). If I follow Zukofsky here, sight plays a unique role among the senses, an odd assertion for the poet who did more than anyone in the 20^th century to reassert the role of sound in verse to be making. It’s as if the three dimensions of the poem were not those of the physical realm but rather time, figured (literally!) through sound, thought articulated through words &, most mysterious of all, sight through which imagination transforms language into action, character, color, the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Bottom is being reissued as volumes III & IV of the Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky, although vol. IV is Celia Zukofsky’s musical arrangement of Shakespeare’s Pericles. The first two volumes are A Useful Art & Le Style Apollinaire.