Although the highlight and main attraction of most streaming services is always new series and seasons of Serial TV, they also attract viewers, and more importantly to them, subscribers, by posting high profile films, often with a holiday slant. Netflix premiered Scorsese’s The Irishman at Thanksgiving 2019 in an attempt to have families stay at home and gather around the TV or computer rather than go out to theaters at the opening of the Christmas blockbuster season.
For 4th of July weekend, Disney+ served up an exquisitely well-filmed but troubling version of the mega New York theater hit Hamilton about the country’s founding fathers. For all its gloss, the Disney+ entry took second fiddle to a relatively unknown BBC film which has been hiding on Netflix for a while, the extraordinary detective thriller about the exploitation of urban minority neighborhoods, City of Tiny Lights.
In the latter, Tommy Akbar (Riz Ahmed) is a two-bit Pakistani private detective who knows his mixed Anglo-Middle Eastern London neighborhood like the back of his hand. He is hired by a sex worker to find her co-worker, and thus begins a trail of death and destruction. The trail leads him to the local mullah and a Muslim group patrolling the streets, a real estate developer he grew up with, an ex-lover also from his childhood, an intimidating American agent supposedly searching for “terrorists,” and the area’s local drug dealers, all against the background of an attempt to “modernize” this turf Tommy loves and has inhabited all his life.
The script is by Patrick Neate from his Edgar-nominated novel, which he translates to the screen in a way that is pitch perfect. The direction stresses visually the ways the neon of the contemporary London scene is broken down and refracted rather than centralized, casting its eerie transmuted glow on all the inhabitants, continually washing them in a false light they must live under.
The master text for this genre of political-economic truth-telling couched in the detective thriller or film noir is, of course, Chinatown. City of Tiny Lights has absorbed the lessons of that model, but the sign of that absorption is that it plays them back in non-clichéd ways and tells us something new about the methods employed to “clean” urban neighborhoods of their inhabitants. As with Chinatown, there is also a crossing of the political with the personal in such a manner that each interacts to reinforce the villainy of the other.
It is instructive in bringing to the fore the extraordinary accomplishment of this film to compare it to another film on the same theme which remains at the level of a preachy thesis film, though its heart is in the right place. Motherless Brooklyn attempts valiantly to recount the way Robert Moses negatively transformed the City of New York in the 1950s, leaving many urban areas blighted. The film, though, is a play-by-the-numbers, utterly clichéd, pale imitation of Chinatown, complete with a Moses stand-in as Chinatown villain Noah Cross and a personal “passing” plot which never really registers. Ed Norton’s performance as the Tourette’s-afflicted detective is all actorly ticks rather than the lived-in inhabiting of a role we find with Riz Ahmed. The end result is a film that seems to be more a Hollywood projection of and imposition on a neighborhood and a city than an actual description of a place.
City of Tiny Lights, on the other hand, delights in the sheer breadth of places and people that Tommy encounters, as well as his familiarity with the bodegas, the mosques, the kids on the corner selling what they can, and the memories of his own past in a mixed neighborhood. All this at a time when there is still so much misunderstanding and fear of poorer neighborhoods, which often are tarred with the “terrorist” label or dismissed as unsuitable for habitation in order to be replaced by luxury high rises. In the end the film sides mightily with the community to be found on these streets, as Tommy, in his dogged pursuit of an inconvenient truth, and in the best noir tradition, helps transform that community into a collective and redeem as a kind of extended family what mainstream media would simply term “denizens of darkness.”
Dennis Broe is a television, film, and culture critic. His criticism appears in Morning Star, People’s World; Culture Matters, Crime Time, and on the Pacifica Network in the U.S., and on Breaking Glass on Art District Radio in Paris. His books include Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure and his novel Left of Eden about the Hollywood Blacklist. Broe taught in the Master’s Program in Film and Television Studies at the Sorbonne, Paris.
