Benji Wilson reviews Stolen, a drama about child trafficking and slavery.
about child trafficking and slavery in Britain today. Photo: BBC
The worry was that Stolen (BBC One, Sunday), a feature-length single drama about child trafficking, might be just a little too preachy to stomach. The alarm bells jangled from the first frame, which was a white-on-black strap reading: “Once upon a time, each and every day in fact, children are being trafficked and put to work, unpaid, unprotected, unseen.” If the first law of television is “show, don’t tell” this was like being lectured by a po-faced Pecksniff, or Bono.
In the event, Justin Chadwick’s film, starring Damian Lewis as a detective in the Human Trafficking Unit, stayed just on the right side of overbearing. I could have done without the loungecore soundtrack more familiar from ads for fleet cars. But in most other aspects Stolen was taut, potent and beautifully filmed.
Stolen followed three children from their arrival in this country. One of them, Rosemary, 11, was brought in by a trafficker, and sold as a house servant. The other two bodies for sale were Kim Pak, a Vietnamese boy, 15, sent to work on a suburban cannabis factory; and Georgie, a 14-year-old Ukrainian who came into the country full of wonder – and left it in a coffin.
Given that the link between them was a cop, Lewis’s Anthony Carter, the film was curiously uncoplike. It paid scant heed to the nuts and bolts of the investigation. It didn’t follow the characters you expected and it took barely a passing interest in Carter’s background and motivations. The focus was squarely on the children, which seems to have been the writer’s point – usually they go unnoticed.
As for Damian Lewis, the aggregate of interviews may suggest he is an old-school smarm-bucket, but whatever you think of him, the screen doesn’t lie: time and again he really is very good indeed. Here he used those warm twinkly eyes and that benevolent half-smile as a veil, barely concealing a man who was exceedingly angry. The film explained why – child trafficking is a $12 billion industry that’s going on all around us. What appalled Carter about that was not the $12 billion, but that putting children into slavery can be termed “industry” at all, as if people were products.
But if Lewis was good, and Chadwick’s direction excellent, they were both knocked into a cocked hat by the young actors, all of them unknowns. It’s just a hunch, but could it be that child actors are getting better with age (mine, not theirs)? Are stage schools the only schools in the country where results are improving? Regardless, Gloria Oyewumi, Huy Pham and Inokentijs Vitkevics were simply spellbinding. In particular the steady realisation on Vitkevics’s face that the Britain he’d first thought was a land of milk and honey was actually Gomorrah, and unbearable. There could be no more piercing reminder of the gap between the country we are, and the country we’d like to think we are.
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
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