By Dennis Harvey

THERE'S A VALUABLE breed of director, whose habitat is most often U.K. TV, that is imaginatively, flexibly, self-effacingly subservient to text. If and when these people make a splash big enough to attract Hollywood's notice, their new, "improved" career usually turns out to be something of a mismatch – not just because the scripts are seldom the point (or very good) in major-studio projects, but also because these are talents best suited to a smaller scale filled with character idiosyncrasy.

Stephen Frears is one of the higher-profile such cases. As a Brit broadcast journeyman from the late '60s through the early '80s, he did a brilliant job mounting knotty screenplays by such brilliant minds as Alan Bennett, Peter Prince, David Hare, Christopher Hampton, and Tom Stoppard. He'd also directed a couple of very good, underhandedly comic crime movies, the 1971 Michael Caine vehicle Gumshoe and the Prince-written 1984 Madrid-noir The Hit, each too clever and small to have much impact. The next year, however, he took on an impish script by a new writer, Hanif Kureishi. Intended to go no further than Channel Four, My Beautiful Laundrette made Kureishi (who has somewhat let down expectations since), launched Daniel Day-Lewis, and rendered Frears "hot."

For a while, Frears seemed up to it. Prick Up Your Ears was a Swinging London biopic almost as sharp and larky as Laundrette's contemporary fiction. Dangerous Liaisons managed the best film version of that story, even making a semi-plus of John Malkovich's perversely uglified take on a master-seducer role. The Grifters caught the bemused, baroque misanthropy of source novelist Jim Thompson. But graduation to big budgets, big stars didn't do much for Frears, or anyone else involved. Hero, Mary Reilly, and The Hi-Lo Country are interesting efforts at intelligent mainstream cinema that fall short under the weight of star casting (Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts) and confused aims. High Fidelity did OK by Nick Hornby (despite the Chicago relocation), becoming the perfect John Cusack vehicle – a nonvalue to me, though not to half of my heterosexual female friends. Frears's next project, Monkeyface, is a "heist thriller" starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas. Does anyone beyond the elephantine couple's agents revel in that depressing, expensive prospect?

The trajectory suggests Frears is a very good interpreter of very good material who's hapless to elevate mediocre or bad stuff. To his credit, he's returned over and over to smaller British projects between Hollywood assignments, notably two Roddy Doyle adaptations (The Snapper, The Van). Dirty Pretty Things is by another newish writer, Steve Knight, and in its tonally very different way it's almost as fresh a take on polyglot London as Laundrette. Frears may be a chameleon, but when the paycheck isn't the deciding factor, he has excellent taste in the material he fades into.

Dirty Pretty Things (a showy title that makes little thematic sense) revolves around Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Nigerian doctor-exile living a hand-to-mouth life in the U.K. He's illegally working as a cab driver and a night clerk at a boutique hotel run by pragmatically slimy Juan (Sergi Lopez). Likewise employed at the hotel as housekeeping staff is Muslim Turkish Senay (Audrey Tautou), a registered refugee – from what, we're never quite told – awaiting governmental approval of her immigrant status. She also rents Okwe use of her apartment couch during his futile attempts at sleep.

Apprised of a possible problem in Room 510 by in-house prostitute Juliette (Sophie Okonedo, so offhandedly funny you wish Juliette would get a movie all her own), Okwe discovers what's clogging the toilet – an intact human heart. This disturbing find leads to the discovery that the hotel profits from on-site organ harvesting that preys on desperate illegal immigrants. Some live, some die. Once savvy to Okwe's medical training, venture capitalist Juan wants nothing more than to incorporate those skills into his criminal-underground trade. Meanwhile, Senay is hounded by suspicious immigration officials (she's not allowed to work while awaiting sanctuary judgment) into a new job at a sweatshop, where the boss is not above sexual blackmail.

Knight's script doesn't always smooth together its various mystery, suspense, caper, and slice-of-life elements. The dialogue is sometimes too pontificating, and the incipient romance between Okwe and Senay (lent a pleasingly brattish streak by Tautou, though the Amelie waif is still too winsomely doll-like for easy casting) is perhaps the least effective aspect here. But Frears handles it all so beautifully that the end result is still near extraordinary. Mercifully eschewing the handheld GrainyVision aesthetics that mark so many recent "realist" films, he renders London through Okwe's melancholic eyes – a city run by an underground of myriad nationalities and various legal standings, glossy and almost hallucinogenic in its sleepless drudgery.