LAST RESORT

About The Film

Tanya (Dina Korzun: The Country of the Deaf) arrives in Britain from Moscow with her young, street-wise son Artiom. She expects to meet her English fiancé Mark, but he fails to turn up and she is detained in immigration. Distraught and confused, she asks for political asylum, without realising that this will trap her in a bleak, bureaucratic nightmare. She and Artiom are taken to a holding area in the grey seaside town of Stonehaven, where they must stay until their papers are processed unless they pay for their own tickets home. Facing a wait of at least a year, Tanya tries to raise money, but the most lucrative offer is an unsavoury one from Internet porn baron Les (Lindsey Honey, real-life porn star "Ben Dover".) Kindness comes from the lonely Alfie (Paddy Considine: A Room for Romeo Brass, Born Romantic) who works at the amusement arcade. As his relationship with Tanya grows, Alfie also comes to represent her only means of escape from an intolerable situation.

Notes

"Powerless outsiders whose existence we prefer not to acknowledge, people used to being looked at without being seen, these are truly lost souls, strangers in a land whose particular strangeness they never anticipated" (Los Angeles Times)

Last Resort is about the plight of two Russian asylum-seekers, mother and son, trapped in a Kafkaesque maze of immeasurably slow bureaucratic processing. Their effective prison is an English seaside resort (actually Margate, standing in for the fictional Stonehaven) where the concept of day-tripping jollity has metamorphosed into chilly amusement arcades and Internet pornography. Instead of welcoming holiday-makers, the town demonstrates its hostility towards the dispossessed of many nations. Their blood and bodies are the only currencies with which they can trade. Ideals and dignity must be left behind at Immigration Control.

That, at least, is the skeleton of the story, a synopsis of Last Resort as it might be played out in a context of issue-driven social drama. It comes initially as a surprise to realise that director Pawlikowski has side-stepped this course by slipping one key detail out of the pattern of narrative expectation: Tanya is not an asylum seeker. She leaves Russia to follow her heart, rather than out of political necessity. Her intended marriage to an Englishman may, given his subsequent absence from the scene, be an optimistic projection, but it certainly isn't a scam to gain citizenship. Tanya isn't a cipher carrying an assigned burden of political meanings. She's a character whose situation has been shaped as much by her personality as by her circumstances. It's this interaction between individuals and the way they find themselves placed (in every sense of the word) which has characterised Pawlikowski's film and television output.

"There are hundreds of refugees in coastal towns in the South of England who all want to be somewhere else. These places are dumping grounds. I wanted to create a feeling in the film that the town is the end of the world, a place from which there is no escape. It really is the Last Resort. It is also an ironic background for this drama because Tanya is not actually a refugee at all. She came to Britain out of love, but ends up living a nightmare. She is processed with the refugees who all want to get a foothold here and are quite unlike her. Everyone can relate to that sense of being trapped - one wrong move and you're caught up in a nightmare. Tanya is a vulnerable woman in a hostile environment.

I wanted to use a particular landscape to tell an original story about characters who transcend that landscape. As a filmmaker, you need characters that represent a social sphere but also resonate beyond it. You need to go beyond sociology and the realm of cardboard cut-outs. Last Resort is not a passionate social plea. It highlights the refugee problem, but as an aside. A socialist realist drama about the misery of refugees would be much more dull. With a love story, you can hook the audience in - everyone can relate to falling in love. What I like was the clash between the bureaucracy of the immigration process and the love story. The very nature of bureaucrats and their mechanical, impersonal way of dealing with people is the antithesis of a passionate love affair. " (From interview in Yahoo! Movies).To preserve the freshness of developing relationships and spontaneous interactions, the director didn't start out with a completed story or a fully written script. There was room for intervention and improvisation, as described by producer Ruth Caleb:
"His modus operandi is unique, as he does not work in a pre-scripted way. Instead, the story simply develops as he is shooting. New ideas are constantly coming out on set. It's very organic. Something happens during the filming that will spark a thought in Pawel's mind, and he'll suddenly go off in a different direction, incorporating things as he goes along. Although this could be a bit hairy at times, I enjoyed his maverick style tremendously. We started the shoot with a really basic story outline which then evolved more than thirty times, each time moving the story in different ways. Also, as the actors developed their characters, Pawel incorporated their ideas into the plot development."

Paddy Considine, who plays the self-effacing Alfie, found this technique initially alarming:
"Pawel didn't even have a set script. He's just fucking nuts….With Last Resort I'd go to work not knowing what scene we would be doing, the location or the tone. It was mad, and I'd be a liar if I said I knew Pawel would pull it off. I thought he had a disastrous mess on his hands. Then when I watched the film the first time, I was blown away by it. I went up to Pawel and apologised for doubting him." (From interview in Sight and Sound.)

Pawlikowski feels that this method was possible: "… because the actors were in character for most of the time and because our documentary way of working gave us a large degree of flexibility. We shot the film more or less chronologically, with a small crew, using minimum lights and a limited number of easily accessible locations. An important factor in the making of the film was the fact that the key actors.

Director's Information

The Polish writer and director Pawel Pawlikowski began his career in television, making award-wining documentaries. A BBC alumnus during the heyday of the corporation's arts programming, his distinctive mixing of fact with elements of the personal and poetic has challenged expectations of the television arts documentary. Dostoevsky's Travels and Serbian Epics, both made for the Bookmark series, exemplify the director's own encapsulation of his field as "Surreal tales of small heroes caught up in the vortex of history" His television credits comprise Lucifer over Lancashire (1986), In the Blood (1987), Extraordinary Adventure (1988), Vaclav Havel (1989), From Moscow to Pietushki (1990), Kids From Famu (1990), Dostoevsky's Travels (1991), Serbian Epics (1992), Tripping with Zhirinovsky (1995).

His previous films are The Stringer (1997) and Twockers (1998)

Last Resort won:

The MICHAEL POWELL AWARD at the Edinburgh Film Festival 2000
BEST FILM and BEST ACTRESS at the Gijon Film Festival 2000
BEST PICTURE, BEST ACTOR, BEST ACTRESS and INTERNATIONAL CRITICS' PRIZE at the Thessaloniki Film Festival 2000
Pawel Pawlikowski also won a BAFTA as MOST PROMISING NEWCOMER TO BRITISH FILM.

What The Critics Said

"With Ryszard Lenczewski's photography managing to lens bleak beauty, this is a sobering and superbly realised portrait of a self-satisfied nation, where protestations of melting-pot liberalism amount to little more than soundbites."
Patrick Peters, EMPIRE.

"Eloquent in its simplicity….Last Resort proves that sometimes an economic style can speak volumes. As such it is a most bracing breath of fresh air for British cinema."
Lizzie Francke, Sight and Sound.

"Last Resort is an intimate chamber piece about love, hope and despair, not necessarily in that order. Spare yet unsparing, emotionally affecting without even a hint of excess, it's an honest, haunting look at the connection between a pair of lonely people who wonder where they belong."
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times.

Credits