London, through a mind darkly

You’d think it wouldn’t be a problem, finding a pub on a Sunday afternoon. But Stephen Frears has standards. He can’t find one shabby enough.

It’s a sunny day along Portobello Road, in the director’s Notting Hill neighborhood. Tonight, at the Evening Standard Awards, Frears’ new movie, “Dirty Pretty Things,” is going to win best British film of the year. Set in the murky underworld of London’s illegal immigrants, “Dirty Pretty Things” has rung up respectable box office figures while earning op-ed praise for addressing an urgent European problem; and Frears, known for grumpily adversarial interviews, is in a buoyant mood. He jerks his thumb toward a corner bar. “See this place? It used to be a run-of-the-mill, half-derelict pub. Now look who’s here.” He raises a hand to stage-whisper, “Fashionable people.” Another reject.

Although “Dirty Pretty Things” explores the sweatshops and hotel kitchens of invisible London, Frears himself lives in highly visible London. Notting Hill is the kind of artsy, prosperous neighborhood where artist-writer dads push baby strollers past opulent antique shops, and a trattoria window posts a testimonial from writer Margaret Drabble: “I enjoy this restaurant so much, I often send characters in my novels to dine there.” The place makes its way into movies too, and as we stroll, Frears points out locations from his favorites. The house in Powis Square where Mick Jagger switches identities with a hit man and scarfs down drugs in Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 “Performance.” The area around All Saints Road where John Boorman -- also in 1970 -- made “Leo the Last,” his surreal parable of race and class war. “It was amazing,” Frears says. “Boorman painted the whole street-front black.”

And how about “Notting Hill”? I ask, referring to Richard Curtis’ 1999 Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts comedy.

“Yes, of course.” Frears winces. He seems aggrieved by Notting Hill’s shift from edgy, disturbing films to fluffy romantic comedy. The director, who is 62 and has lived here 27 years, can’t believe how trendy-spendy the place has become; All Saints Road is now upscale boutiques selling $300 eyeglasses and cafes serving spaghettini with caramelized squid. “And this used to be a black-power neighborhood,” Frears murmurs. He frowns, momentarily abstracted, as if gazing at some London beneath the surface, that only he can see.

Frears has been bringing this submerged London to the screen ever since “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), Hanif Kureishi’s story of a young, gay Anglo-Pakistani who joins with a Cockney street tough to run a London Laundromat. Pakistani “in-betweens,” skinheads and squatters, a gay interracial couple in a passionate kiss: With gritty tenderness, Frears showcased lives on the margins of Thatcher’s England.

When we finally settle on a bar, the Cock and Bull (“a good pub,” Frears comments, “they haven’t poshed it up yet”), the director orders a Diet Coke instead of beer -- “that’s what a heart attack will do for you,” he quips with typical morbid cheer -- and talks about his career. Frears’ resume since “Laundrette” includes one “perfect film” (“Dangerous Liaisons”), one Oscar nominee (“The Grifters”), a couple of big-budget Hollywood movies (“Hero,” “Mary Reilly”) and a warm adaptation of a British pop novel (“High Fidelity,” starring John Cusack). Interspersed among these U.S. pictures are several small-budget returns to the subject elaborated on in “Laundrette,” “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” “Prick Up Your Ears” and now “Dirty Pretty Things”: London, the multicultural city.

The London of these films is a racy, violent place, seductive and shocking. Frears grew up in Leicester -- “a boring city in the heart of England” -- and his take on the metropolis reflects a double vantage point. “People in rural Britain are very frightened,” he says. “When you go out to the country it’s like the 1940s. If I take a black friend, people stare.” In Frears’ view, the English are desperately pretending multiethnic Britain doesn’t exist, while London keeps vividly reminding them that it does. “You walk around these streets,” the director says, “and class is going on, race is going on, sex is going on. It’s all there.”

“Dirty Pretty Things” follows the struggles of a Nigerian illegal, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), night desk clerk at a London hotel, and a Turkish asylum-seeker, Senay (Audrey Tautou, of “Amelie” fame), working as a maid at the same hotel. The drama begins with a gruesome late-night discovery: Okwe unplugs a toilet in an empty room and to his horror fishes out a human heart. It’s gory evidence of an organ trafficking ring in which desperate illegals sell kidneys for cash or passports.

The film, which opened Friday in Los Angeles, takes place in a claustrophobic world of maid stations and laundries and grimy taxi dispatch rooms. Screenwriter Steve Knight (co-creator, in a transcendent irony, of the original, British “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”) took his cue from grim North London sweatshops and rowdy ethnic markets: the London of mosques and Halal butchers and travel agents boasting cheap flights to Ankara; of the Nigerian Fast Food stand and the All-Nations Hairdressing salon.

“Dirty Pretty Things” arrives amid an explosion of illegal immigration in the U.K., including horrific incidents like the July 2000 death of 58 Chinese immigrants found suffocated in a truck container in Dover. Knight scripted his drama around this brutal reduction of people to cargo -- to material, chopped up and sold for parts. “The organ trade is a perfect metaphor for profound exploitation,” he explains. Featuring botched backroom surgeries and organs sold in parking garages, the script mingled documentary expose with grisly political poetry. To bring it to the screen, the producers wanted a London director “with multicultural credentials.” Frears was the perfect choice.

“The story has a social conscience, and it had to be gripping,” Knight says. “There’s simply no one else who could tell it as well as Stephen.”

An unlikely advocate

So how did someone like Frears -- a provincial, Cambridge-educated son of the white middle class -- emerge as the Zadie Smith of directors, champion of the excluded and spokesman for multicultural Britain?

When I phone the director at home to ask him, Frears answers over background noise that sounds distinctly like splashing.

“Where are you?” I ask. “Are you -- ?”

“In the tub? Yes, that’s exactly where I am!” And so I conduct a 45-minute interview to the slosh and trickle of one of Britain’s leading directors relaxing in the bath after a long day of work. It’s quite loud. Does he have a toy duck in the tub with him? I ask.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I’m a mature person.”

Frears strikes one as essentially jolly with an overlay of gloomy-grouchy; or is it the other way around? On a movie set he has a reputation for a saving humor. But catch him in a black mood, or pursue a line of questioning he doesn’t like, and he’ll evade, filibuster, and generally dis your question with virtuoso riffs of grouchiness. “How should I know?” he bellows when I ask why he’s drawn to multicultural subjects. “Ask my analyst!” But I persevere. How did he end up making a movie without a single white character?

“That’s the way it was written!” he says.

In fact, there was a white character in Knight’s screenplay, a surgeon. But Frears got rid of him. “The character didn’t have whatever I needed,” he explains. “If the thing doesn’t have life, there’s no point in doing it.”

Vitality is what he found in “Laundrette,” Frears goes on to say -- in the writing, and in the crowded, complex world of Kureishi’s Pakistani in-betweens. “If you ask me to make a film about London, it has to have that vitality. These people in the films I’ve made, they have a fight that’s worth engaging. That’s what has lit my fuse. If I were to make a movie about someone of the upper classes, well, the upper classes don’t have a fight.”

Frears balks at the label “political director”: “This is a thriller, with a love story and a hero,” he insists of “Dirty Pretty Things.” Yet he and other British directors of his generation, such as Michael Apted, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, came of age during an era of political filmmaking. His mentors, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, were founding figures of Britain’s Free Cinema movement of the 1950s and early ‘60s, with its emphasis on socially conscious, working-class films. And although Frears calls “Dirty Pretty Things” a thriller, beneath its neo-noir trappings, his film’s dark urban legend of a heart fished from a toilet is pure Victorian melodrama. It reaches deep into London’s Grand Guignol imagery for a grimly fatalistic rendering of the multicultural city.

“Well, of course you know you’re taking on a difficult subject,” the director says when I suggest that his movie’s unblinking chronicle of medical brutality and extorted sex seems determined to out-bleak “Bleak House.” “But Americans are watching ‘ER’ every night!” Does Frears want to disturb his audience or entertain them? “Both!” he insists. “Look at Capra’s films -- they were about contemporary problems. You might as well say that ‘The French Connection’ shouldn’t try to entertain!”

A big slosh and drip. “I’m getting out of the tub,” Frears announces. We say our goodbyes, and I let the director towel off in peace.

Frears likes to talk about the challenge of “marrying European and American cinema,” and indeed, “Dirty Pretty Things” melds both halves of his career: the ‘60s cinema of engagement and the slick American entertainment. Whether the result is a brilliant synthesis, an awkward hybrid or a stealth political tract -- a Trojan horse of a movie, wheeled into theaters as a sleek crime thriller, with an army of real-life misery hidden inside -- you can see the challenge he has set for himself, and for viewers. “Stephen has the ability to completely understand an audience -- and to test it,” says Chiwetel Ejiofor, co-star of “Dirty Pretty Things.” “There’s no dumbing-down whatsoever. And that’s Stephen. His intelligence is written all over this film.”

A rumpled discomfort

Returning from the pub to Frears’ house, we find his teenage daughter, Lola,doing homework at the kitchen table, while Frears’ wife, painter Anne Rothenstein, pushes a vacuum cleaner. Is this a leave-your-dirty-shoes-at-the-door household? I ask. “Take a look around and tell me what you think!” Rothenstein laughs, as Frears heads for the stove to make a pot of tea.

The house is clearly an artist and reader’s house, with paintings everywhere, and books and magazines handy in the loo; the shelves in Frears’ upstairs study gleam orange with Penguin paperbacks. My eye lands on two editions of “The Hite Report.” Years ago, sex researcher Shere Hite, after watching “Laundrette” and “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” pegged Frears as a sexual revolutionary and sent him her books. “I find them a little shocking, actually,” he jokes. It amuses him endlessly that although he was already in his mid-40s when he made “My Beautiful Laundrette,” people assumed he was a hot young director -- “some bloke in leather pants,” he says with a laugh.

The director runs a hand through his tousled hair. Frears’ rumpled appearance -- Glenn Close says he looks like a stadium after the game is over -- adds to the impression of a man who is habitually comfortable: comfortable in his old clothes and cluttered house, comfortable among his books and with his family (Frears has two children with Rothenstein and two from an earlier marriage).

Standing in his cozy office, surrounded by snapshots of him with George Clooney, Dustin Hoffman and other stars, he expresses mock bafflement when I ask about the violence and dislocation of his London movies. “Sounds grim, doesn’t it?” he says. “And you see what a lovely life I lead.”

But Frears doesn’t make movies about his lovely life. His characters find themselves in far less lovely ones, struggling to attain a bit of safety and sanity. This cinematic nightmare of life beyond the pale of middle-class comforts traces to a childhood eked out during World War II and the hard years afterward.

“I was brought up in a country with not enough food, not enough light, not enough fuel,” Frears recalls. “We were broke and devastated.” A deep memory of privation, darkness and ruin maps the London of his imagination, unearthing the Dickensian city of scarcity beneath the upscale present and its fantasy of having it all. “This warm comfortable life,” Frears muses. “It didn’t exist. It was unimaginable, really.”

Throughout his career Frears has kept his gaze aimed toward the margins, fixed on the world of not-Notting Hill. Spending a day with him leaves you struck by how vivid gloominess can be, how resilient a person’s intuition of catastrophe. Frears doesn’t spare himself. Success for a director can be fleeting, he likes to remind you; talent itself is a temporary gift. Each movie might be the one that fails. And you won’t know it, he says, until it has already happened.

Such steadfast foreboding requires an imagination keyed not to having it all but to losing it all. “Wish me luck tonight!” Frears says when we part. He’s referring to the Evening Standard Awards ceremony later on, and I remind him that he has already won the prize.

The director grins. “Who knows?” he says. “They might not let me. They might take it away.”