The quotation could come from any of three films, and encapsulate each of them precisely. "Go to hell," says the vulnerable young girl in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things. Her betrayer smiles a Faustian smile. "This is hell," he says.
A hell of exploitation, manipulation and corruption; a hell where more than innocence dies. We could be talking about Michael Winterbottom's In This World, where asylum seekers choke in an airless black box at the back of an anonymous lorry. We could be talking about Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever, where a 16-year-old girl is gulled into prostitution. But whether the trade is in body parts or bodies themselves, the basic terms of such trade remain unchanged. "How come I've never seen you before?" someone asks Frears's Nigerian refugee hero. "Because we are the people you never see."
Is it coincidence that, within a handful of months, three directors of hugely varied backgrounds and experience have chosen to make movies that open the same scars of modern humanity? Frears, after all, is a man - some even say journeyman - for all seasons, including Hollywood mainstream. Winterbottom could last be observed turning over party people on Manchester's music scene.
Moodysson's Together was a wry, essentially gentle look at what happened when flower lost its power in Sweden 30 years ago. There is nothing in their previous work to predict films joined emotionally by such controlled ferocity. No wonder some critics are talking about a change of mood and cinema focus, a "new seriousness".
Such claims probably don't do any of the trio many box-office favours. They make the films, like the issues they confront, seem irredeemably grim. But, of course, the making - like the impact - is far subtler than that.
Take Lilya 4-Ever. It begins with a battered, desperate girl poised on a motorway bridge, looking down. The end of her road. Flashback to only "three months earlier". There are no surprises as those months unwind; there is no doubt about where the last take will take us. Yet storytelling in that narrow sense is not part of Moodysson's screenplay or direction. His tools are time and place and character. His job is to make us feel, not man the barricades.
This Lilya lives somewhere amid the grey, concrete detritus of the former Soviet Union. (It's filmed in Tallinn, but it could be Kiev or Tbilisi or the Elephant and Castle.) She is a slim, pert blonde caught between teenage bolshiness and the last vestiges of childhood. Mum and her new man are going to live in the US, Lilya crows to her gang.
But then the mother goes without her, leaving Lilya alone in a flat with only broken promises for company. Her grisly aunt evicts her, pushing her into a stinking, chaotic hole of a bedsit. The money dries up. She goes to a city club with a mate who opens her legs for cash, the easiest transaction possible. So, inevitably, it goes. There is no alternative. A doe-eyed twister of a nice boy picks her up and ships her off to Sweden. More young meat for the flesh trade. The bridge and the motorway await.
Do we care? Like Moodysson, we come to care with a passion. This Lilya may be a victim, but she is no cypher. A 16-year-old Russian, Oksana Akinshina, plays her with haunting, clear-eyed poise.
One minute, she is an irritating, petulant rebel, winding up supermarket check-out girls, playing her music too loud, cannoning into old women on the stairs and never pausing to help. The next, she is melting and vulnerable, taking a deserted 14-year-old kid called Volodya under her wing and showing him what best friends are for. Together they make a cocoon for themselves against engulfing hopelessness - and then are swept away.
It is a tragedy in every classical sense but one: this Lilya has no fatal flaw, commits no fatal sin. Moodysson wants us to see the difference between "rich people who think everything can be bought and poor people who are forced to sell everything they have... a culture where you can buy anything, these people, their labour or their intestines - kidneys from India or Turkey..." And we see precisely that. We also see how the export of unwilling flesh from East to West, from poverty to pimping, operates. From Soho to Stockholm, Munich to Madrid, these are the frightened and exploited, slaves to a malign, mass trade.
And kidneys? That's Dirty Pretty Things, of course. That's wide-eyed Audrey Tautou as a young Turk waiting for her right to refuge in Britain, pursued by immigration men, propositioned by the slimy Spanish manager of the hotel where she is a chambermaid, driven to the brink of selling not merely her body, but the body organs which Moodysson's own middle men might value most. There is exactly the same tension here as in Lilya, or In This World. There is also the rare dramatic punch that accompanies brilliant movie-making.
The Guardian recently asked three supposed immigration experts - a politician, a journalist and a campaigner - what difference seeing In This World had made to their settled beliefs. Nothing amazing followed. David Mellor and co produced due praise for Winterbottom's directorial skills, yet otherwise came up with the numbers they had first thought of.
But I think they miss the point of Moodysson and Frears, as well as Winterbottom. All drama is loaded to some extent, of course. The two young Afghans trying to make it through the wastelands of the Middle East to a safe haven in NW6 are supposed to become real to us, to have a human appeal beyond the arid statistics of David Blunkett's Commons brief.
Lilya lives and breathes. So do Tautou and co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor. But they are also all figures in a landscape. I have been to the shanty towns which house two decades of Afghan refugees along the north side of the road from Peshawar to the Khyber Pass. Literally the wrong side of the tracks. Make your money from drugs or smuggling and you can move to the south side and build a marbled villa - but that's no option in Winterbottom's particular world. We get to know Jamal and Enayat; we are also, crucially, shown how they bond and struggle to survive in the bitterest road movie of the lot. Background and foreground melded.
That is Frears's great strength, too. Here is Britain 2002, but from beginning to end you barely see an ordinary Brit. Here are the people you never see: the floor managers of three-star hotels, the maids, the cooks, the porters. Nations united to glide unobtrusively around the back corridors of an alien land. It is the kick in the stomach, suddenly delivered. All this is taking place in the country you thought you knew; but it is a strange and different country.
Character against setting. Moodysson's grim 1950s and 1960s tower blocks on the edge of the city are, in one sense, Anywheresville. Been there, experienced that. Britain's architects of dereliction have as much to answer for as Khruschev's. But watch Akinshina, a brightness of inexperience flickering with life against this urban twilight.
In every case, you understand what the victims are escaping from, why they are as they are, why they feel as they do. In Moldova, Moodysson says, 90% of young people want to emigrate. Who can blame them? Who, in heaven, would want to stay? And once you see that, perhaps, you can never see asylum-seeking - or its big brother, economic emigration - in quite the same way again.
There are things about these three movies that film critics can pick holes in: Winterbottom sometimes floats too ambivalently in "docu-drama"; Frears softens his pretty things too much at the close by playing caper movies; Moodysson uses Lilya's religion, her prayers to a deaf and implacable God, too relentlessly to construct a dreamy ending of angels and spoonfuls of sugar. But these are cavils and, at root, only the difference between fact and a greater, truth-telling fiction.
I went into a London three-star hotel the other day and looked, instinctively, at the women behind the reception desk? Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Pakistani? I saw them for the first time. And the West End girls of the alleys and doorways and clubs, the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the refugees from Belarus? They, too, come from somewhere now. They seem to have an identity, a past and, perhaps, a future.
If this is a "new seriousness", then it arrives as a window to our own world, the themes and the issues tackled up close and, thereafter, in the wider context where people and politics meet. Not didactic, not in the least forbidding and always absorbing.
This may be hell, but it is a hell we made and can, if we wish, do something about.
· Lilya 4-Ever is out on April 25. In This World and Dirty Pretty Things are on general release.
