Desperate cargo

In Krsko, a rundown industrial town in southern Slovenia, the inhabitants while away their time in the threatening shadow of the vast nuclear plant opened by President Tito in 1974. They swim in a municipal pool set in its shadow, and they are buried in a cemetery which it overlooks. Their lives - if director Damjan Kozole is to be believed - are an empty, carcinoma- inducing- go- round of radioactive leaks, beer, fags, charmless sexual coupling and speedway racing.

Spare Parts begins and ends at the speedway track, where those curiously customised motorcycles circle the dirt track in a continuous skid. Ludvik (Peter Musevski), was once a speedway champion, a glamorous, leather-clad knight of the new, post-Communist era.

But that was more than a decade ago; now, he is a sour walrus of a man, his damp moustache hiding his sardonic mouth. Ludvik has beaten one bout of cancer using his own "urinotherapy", a matutinal glass of his own piss. However, his wife was not so lucky, and committed suicide rather than face a lingering death.

We meet Ludvik at the track, sucking on his bitter beer and fatalistic fags. With us is fresh-faced Rudi (Aljosa Kovacic), the new recruit to an horrific haulage business. For Ludvik is the white van man from Hell, who collects his cargo from gangsters at the Croatian border, only to deliver it to more gangsters at the Italian one.

Not that he's a drug dealer, you understand - he and his co-workers despise such trafficking - no, he is a carrier of humans. If it weren't for the fact that it would alert the police to his activities, Ludvik might well have one of those "Live Organs in Transit" signs on the back of his scummy vehicle, because so far as he is concerned that is what these people are: not "asylum seekers", " economic migrants", "refugees", or indeed any other tired euphemism, merely potential donors to the black market in Italy for spare human parts.

Three films that dealt with people-smuggling were entered for last year's Berlin Film Festival. Michael Winterbottom's Golden Bear winner, In This World, and Hans-Christian Schmid's Distant Lights dealt with the trade from the point of view of the flesh and blood commodity.

Stephen Frears's fine, but flawed, Dirty Pretty Things brought home to London's comfortable burghers the dark, economic underbelly of our thriving city. Kozole's Spare Parts resists all the available - and facile - dichotomies, to present the smugglers themselves in all their grimy awfulness.

On his first run with Ludvik, Rudi is confronted with a small corner of Hell when, in a decrepit barn - their grotesque equivalent of a service centre - the gang force a young Macedonian girl to have sex with them in exchange for American antibiotics for her sick boyfriend and a pizza costing E50. Rudi may give the girl his money while refusing to violate her, but already he is fully implicated in the trade; a complicity which is sealed that night in a drinking session with his boss. Pie-eyed, Ludvik rails against the modern world: "I tell you what busts my chops," he slurs, "globalisation." And he goes on to hymn a Europe in which local products were only available in their country of origin: "Peck salami and Bull's Blood in Hungary, Mozart balls in Vienna", before collapsing into, "the fucking world is shit!"

BUT if viewers are seeking some overarching rationalisation - or even justification - of Ludvik's behaviour in this tirade against the modern McWorld, they will be disappointed. Not the least virtue of Spare Parts is that it resists moral certainty. In this crepuscular realm of motorways, pine forests, fast-food joints and crumbling Soviet-era apartments, the ethics are of as low a wattage as the light fixtures.

Rudi and Ludvik may develop something of a father-son relationship - cemented by beer, grouted with fist fights - but this is a patrimony of anomie, for the parts these two men play are as interchangeable as any of their stateless cargo.