Director Pawel Pawlikowski
"Last Resort is not a passionate social plee. It highlights the refugee problem, but as an aside. A social realist drama about the misery of refugees would be much more dull. With a love story, you can hook the audience in--everone can relate to falling in love. What I like was the clash between the bureaucracy of the immigration process and the love story." Pawel Pawlikowski
Despite what sounds like a soft sell for a romance film Last Resort is an excellently directed film about refugee hell. On one hand it's about a Russian woman who learns the hard way that chasing after someone you think you’ve fallen in love with can be a bad idea and on the other it's about someone arriving in a new country and encountering a worse case scenario.
Tanya (Dina Korzun) is a young Russian woman who arrives with her son (Artiom Strelnikov) in England with the intention of hooking up with her fiancé. But coming through customs she becomes so confused and distraught that she somehow gets herself listed as a refugee. Soon she and her son are being trucked off to a local refugee holding site.
The authorities set her and her son up in a grimy old apartment out by a bleak, run down old seaside resort with instructions that she cannot leave the area for at least a year. She basically ends up in the middle of a world that is just as difficult to move around in as the former Soviet Union.
With little money, no friends, no job, no passport and facing a bureaucratic nightmare just to move from place to place she realizes she has little hope. Her fiancé never shows up to rescue her and, to add insult to injury, she becomes totally vulnerable to the local internet pornography ring that promises big money for a few minutes of posing.
As fortune would have it, Tanya meets Alfie (Paddy Considine -- looking a bit like a yougn John Doe) an amusingly amiable young man who works in a nearby arcade. In a short time he becomes a sort of father figure to the boy and adds a bit of hope and promise of romance to her life. But she’s learned the hard way that following her heart is not enough -- her only goal is to follow her head and get out of England.
Last Resort is very much in the social-realist vein similar to the films of both Ken Loach (but with more hope) and Mike Leigh (but less quirky). And it shows, more than anything, that the refugee experience in England is as difficult as anywhere else in the world.
Director Pawlikowski shows a deft hand at directing actors in a naturalistic way and -- perhaps because he has made many documentaries -- he has a keen way of framing the characters within their environment. Stylistically, the film has the feel of a documentary too with its hand held camera and flat, non-defused light, which underscores the drab environment.
- Matt Langdon