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7 best expat movies of all time
If you never knew how painful, surreal and heartbreaking expat life could be, block out a weekend, and your windows, and settle down with these masterpieces
If the worst movies about expat life aren't enough to put you off moving overseas, then the best ones certainly are.
For would-be overseas workers who think it's all about lounging in exotic bars dressed in linen suits and Panama hats, these servings of classic cinema should set the record straight.
So pull up a chair, toss your passport on the fire, then watch and learn how it's done from the old hands.
7. 'Dirty Pretty Things' (2002)
The pretty comes free. For the dirty, you have to pay.
French actress Audrey Tatou finds herself a long way from the tooth-achingly sweet world of "Amelie" as Turkish cleaner Senay ekeing out an existence in London’s grimy underworld of exploited immigrant workers.
There's no one to steal her heart here -- although Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Nigerian hotel porter, with whom she timeshares a bed, comes close -- they're just after her kidney.
Enlightening expat dialog
Senay: "He said he would report me to immigration, and he made me suck. But today I bit."
6. 'The Wages of Fear' (1953)
"I'll ... never ... teach ... ESL ... again!"
This brutal piece of black and white French cinema reeks of unwashed vests, but its depiction of nasty expat truck drivers worthlessly risking their grubby lives in the South American jungle is as explosive as the deadly nitroglycerine cargoes they’re paid to deliver.
Everyone is detestable, everyone dies and not even the dogs care. That's how expat life should be.
Enlightening expat dialog
Dick: "When I was a kid, I used to see men go off on these kinds of jobs ... and not come back."
5. 'Straw Dogs' (1971)
"No, really, I love the smell of tweed in the morning."
“Wild Bunch” director Sam Peckinpah takes a double-barrel shotgun to all those smug, honey-hued films about rural expat life in this tale about repressed American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) relocating to his wife’s Cornish village.
There are no hilarious misunderstandings with local plumbers, just thugs on tricycles.
There's no sun-kissed romance, just a marriage disintegrating into domestic violence.
And there are no life-affirming friendships, just a cat getting throttled.
The film's brutality is a bit hard to stomach. No doubt the remake starring Kate Bosworth, due out later this year, will also to be hard to stomach, but for entirely different reasons.
Enlightening expat dialog
Henry Niles: "I don't know my way home."
David Sumner: "That's OK. I don't either."
More on CNNGo: Drunken British expats should be chained up
4. 'The Last King of Scotland' (2006)
"Homeboy wearing blue polyester and bangs in 114-degree heat, and they call me crazy?"
Giles Foden's novel of a Scottish doctor unwittingly pulled into Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's inner circle is successfully reworked for cinema as a cautionary tale of how a libidinous expat lifestyle can leave you with blood on your hands and the job of helping a flatulent Amin (Forest Whitaker) overcome chronic gas with the help of a baseball bat.
Enlightening expat dialog
Nicholas Garrigan: "My name is Nicholas Garrigan, and I'm from Scotland. I need to go home now."
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