Dirty Pretty Things (spoilers!)

According to James Berardinelli:

Okwe (Chiwetel Ejofor) is a Nigerian doctor who is living illegally in London and surviving by working two jobs. By day, he is a cab driver. By night, he is behind the counter at a hotel. On those rare occasions when he finds time to sleep, he crashes at the apartment of his friend, Senay (Audrey Tautou). Senay is a Turkish immigrant who is being watched by the authorities. Under the terms of her admission to the United Kingdom, she is not allowed to rent space in her room to anyone else or to engage in paid employment for at least six months. She is doing both, and that places her in jeopardy. Meanwhile, at the hotel, Okwe discovers that the manager, Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), is running a black market organ business. He will obtain forged passports for anyone willing to give up a kidney. He then sells that kidney to an organ "supplier" for $10,000. Okwe is shocked by this, but his friends are not, and they wonder at his naïveté. He is forced to make a moral choice when Sneaky makes him a job offer. If Okwe will put his surgical skills to use removing kidneys, Sneaky will provide forged papers for him and Senay so he can return to Nigeria and she can go to New York.

First of all, I've got a question about what kind of herb Okwe is chewing to stay awake. On the internet, I see guesses from coca leaves to betel to khat. But I guess it doesn't really matter; it's artistic license. Still, I've got plenty of quibbles: Chiwetel Ejofor is great, but why get a French woman to play a Turk? And how is it that she decides to let Okwe stay in her apartment but doesn't give him a key at first? And then Okwe discovers the whole black market organ business when he finds a human heart blocking up a toilet. Later the manager suggests that when an operation goes wrong, they cut up the dead patient and flush them down the toilet. So they tried to flush a heart down a toilet? And this is the manager of a hotel? He's never had experience with blocked toilets? And when Okwe, Senay, and the prostitute exchange the kidney for the cash, the buyer says asks who they are, Okwe says something like "we're the people you never see: the people who drive you, clean your toilets, and give you blowjobs," so of course the assumption is that the hegemony of managers doesn't understand the world of the subaltern. The subaltern does all the real work while the managers are parasites. Or the director fell in love with the idea of the heart in the toilet. How symbolic.

As David Edelstein writes,

The screenwriter, Steven Knight, is an English TV veteran who helped to create the original Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, and the grasping/yearning quality of that infamous title is in every scene: The film is, Who Wants To Be a Citizen-and What Part of Your Anatomy Will You Give Up?

That's cute.

The fact that the only solution for Senay is to get a passport means that someone has to lose a kidney, but instead of her it's Sneaky. Now they can't just cut it out of him, because they believe that it's wrong (my problem is I think anyone who wants to sell their organs should be allowed to). So, we must perceive the oppressor-manager Sneaky as thoroughly evil, and he forces the virgin Senay to have sex with him. But if he hadn't had sex with her, how would she have solved her problem? In the old days the heroine had to be rescued before she had sex with the bad guy. Now apparently a woman's having unwanted sex forced upon her doesn't matter as much as losing an organ. Go figure.