Sex Traffic

Abi Morgan’s two-part drama, directed by David Yates and first shown on 10 October 2004, has one idea and sticks to it. Trafficking women is a business, and a business has a supply chain. So the story is told along that chain, in three countries at once: the Moldovan sisters who are the goods, the London charity worker who is trying to trace them, and the Boston boardroom where the money ends up. It runs to two episodes of 90 minutes each, and it is one of the best things British television made that decade. We would recommend it to anyone who can stand it.

The spine is the sisters. Elena (Anamaria Marinca) is the older and the harder, and Vara (Maria Popistașu) is the one who still thinks the waitressing job in Italy might be real. Marinca does almost nothing with her face for the first hour, which is the right choice; by the time she lets anything through, we have been waiting for it. Chris Seager shoots their journey on grainy, handheld video, in buses and back rooms and bars lit by one fluorescent tube, so that the Balkans look like somewhere you pass through at night and never see in daylight. Nobody has bothered to make it look like television, and that is why it looks like the news.

We were horrified, and we should say by what. It is not the violence, though there is some. It is the scene in which the sisters are stood in a line in a Bosnian bar and inspected by the men who are going to buy them, and then the quiet conversation afterwards in which Elena is told, politely, what she now owes for her own transport. Morgan writes that exchange as arithmetic. Mark Day cuts away from it to Daniel Appleton (John Simm) in a London office, photocopying, and the cut does the moral work without a line of dialogue.

Simm is good at playing men who are decent and not quite up to the job, and Daniel is one of those. He is dogged rather than brave, and the charity he works for, built by production designer Candida Otton out of pinboards, filing cabinets and a kettle, is plainly short of money and influence. The London end gives smaller parts to Paterson Joseph, Jason Watkins and Dolly Wells, all of them playing people who would rather the problem belonged to someone else. Jonathan Goldsmith’s score stays low and mostly out of the way, a few sustained notes under the bus journeys and nothing at all in the bars, which is the correct decision for material like this.

The weak link is Boston. Wendy Crewson plays Madeleine Harlsburgh with real care, a woman who has organised her life around not asking questions, and Len Cariou’s Magnus Herzoff is a convincing picture of a chief executive who has never once thought of the women as women. Maury Chaykin turns up to be unpleasant and does it well. But this strand is written as a lesson, and we can feel the beats being counted off: the charity gala, the awkward dinner, the moment Madeleine first notices something. Anushia Nieradzik dresses her in cream and pale blue so that she looks like the only clean thing in the series, which is the point, and also the problem. Elena and Vara are people. Madeleine is an argument.

Yates is good at holding a lot of threads taut, and the one review so far rightly notices it. There is never a moment across three hours where we lost track of who was in which country or what they owed whom. That is harder than it sounds, and Day’s editing deserves as much credit as the direction. Where the series stumbles it is because Morgan wants to be sure we have understood, and in the last hour she has characters say things to each other that the pictures had already told us.

It carries an 18 certificate and it earns it. We would not watch both episodes in one sitting, and we would not watch the second one late at night. But watch it. The bus station in the first ten minutes is the kind of ordinary place you will not look at the same way afterwards.