Postcolonial purgatory

Abstract

Stephen Frears’s (2002) film Dirty Pretty Things is a compelling thriller-romance much lauded for the way it reveals the invisible underworld of twenty-first-century Britain’s unregulated immigrant workforce (Hovet, 2006). The film weaves a poignant love story between two such migrants, the Nigerian Okwe and Turkish Senay, into a much darker plot surrounding the illegal trade in body organs. Both have fled their home countries in search of new identities, only to become trapped in a hellish existence in London. With only a limited awareness of the dangers she will face, Senay volunteers to be a kidney donor in order to gain a passport to leave the country. Against his convictions, Okwe, a trained doctor, agrees to do the operation in order to protect her. By entering the illegal trade Senay unwittingly exposes herself to a sexual attack. Throughout the film bodies and body parts are traded for official identities in a similarly violent and exploitative way. This insidious economy makes both love and any definitive sense of home or community for the migrants seem impossible.