Last Resort

United Kingdom

2000

73 Min

Color

1.75:1

Russian, English

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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EXEC Chris Collins, Alex Holmes, David M. Thompson

SCR Rowan Joffe, Paweł Pawlikowski

CAST Dina Korzun, Artyom Strelnikov, Paddy Considine, Steve Perry, Perry Benson, Katie Drinkwater, Dave Bean, Adrian Scarborough

Edinburgh (Focus on British Cinema): Best New British Film, Venice (Cinema of the Present), London (New British Cinema): FIPRESCI Prize - Special Mention, Sundance (World Cinema), Rotterdam (Main Programme), Karlovy Vary (East Meets West)

Synopsis

Russian woman spends months with her son in an refugee centre in London, waiting for her fiancé who never turns up. Misery combatted with humour and vitality.

‘What I didn’t want to make was one of those British issue-based gritty films about life in the margins’, according to the Polish-born director Pawlikowski. Last Resort is indeed not the depressing social drama that it could have been, judging by the story that Pawlikowski wants to tell.Tanya is a young Russian woman who arrives with her small son at a station in London, to be united with her British fiancé. However she is stopped at the border by suspicious immigration officials. To avoid being sent straight back to Moscow she asks for political asylum. She is taken to Stonehaven, a centre for asylum seekers. She keeps trying to get in touch with her fiancé, but without success. While awaiting a decision about her status, she is given a flat and a handful of food vouchers. Her fiancé never turns up, but it will take months before she can officially be sent back to Russia. Despite its far-from cheerful story, Last Resort is not a sad film. That is largely thanks to the appealing characters, who manage to transcend their miserable circumstances and chilling surroundings with vitality, humour and warmth. Despite the British setting, the film does not look very British: the monotonous concrete landscape with its subtle shades of grey almost looks beautiful. Last Resort won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki Festival. –IFFR

Director

Paweł Pawlikowski

Paweł Pawlikowski (born 1957) is a Polish-born, Oxford-based, BAFTA Award-winning filmmaker and academic. He garnered much acclaim for his BAFTA Award-winning Last Resort which he wrote and directed in 2000 and My Summer of Love, loosely based on Helen Cross’ novel, which also won a BAFTA and a string of other awards at festivals around the world.

At the age of 14, Pawlikowski left communist Poland to live in Germany and Italy, before settling in Britain. In the late 1980s and ‘90s Pawlikowski was best known for his documentaries, whose blend of lyricism and irony won him many fans and awards around the world. Moscow Pietushki was a poetic journey into the world of the Russian cult writer Venedikt Erofeev, for which he won Emmy and RTS Awards, a Prix Italia and others. The multi-award winning Dostoevsky’s Travels was a tragi-comic road movie with a St Petersburg tram driver and the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, as he travels rough around Western Europe haunting… read more

Paweł Pawlikowski (born 1957) is a Polish-born, Oxford-based, BAFTA Award-winning filmmaker and academic. He garnered much acclaim for his BAFTA Award-winning Last Resort which he wrote and directed in 2000 and My Summer of Love, loosely based on Helen Cross’ novel, which also won a BAFTA and a string of other awards at festivals around the world.

At the age of 14, Pawlikowski left communist Poland to live in Germany and Italy, before settling in Britain. In the late 1980s and ‘90s Pawlikowski was best known for his documentaries, whose blend of lyricism and irony won him many fans and awards around the world. Moscow Pietushki was a poetic journey into the world of the Russian cult writer Venedikt Erofeev, for which he won Emmy and RTS Awards, a Prix Italia and others. The multi-award winning Dostoevsky’s Travels was a tragi-comic road movie with a St Petersburg tram driver and the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, as he travels rough around Western Europe haunting high-minded humanists, aristocrats, monarchists and the Baden Baden casino – in his quest to raise money to buy a second hand Mercedes. Pawlikowski’s most original and formally successful film was Serbian Epics (1992), made at the height of the Bosnian War. The oblique, ironic, imagistic, at times almost hypnotic study of myth-making and murder made aroused a storm of controversy and incomprehension at the time, but has now secured it something of a cult status. The absurdist Tripping with Zhirinovsky, a surreal boat journey down the Volga with the Russian would-be dictator (Zhirinovsky) has won Pawlikowski the Grierson award for the Best British Documentary in 1995.

Pawlikowski’s transition to fiction occurred in 1998 with a small 50 minute hybrid film Twockers, a lyrical and gritty love story set on a sink estate in Yorkshire, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Ian Duncan.

Between 2004 and 2007 he was a Creative Arts Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. In addition to his native Polish, Pawlikowski is fluent in English, French, German, Italian and Russian while having a good grasp of Serbo-Croatian and Spanish.

In 2004 he directed My Summer of Love with Emily Blunt and Natalie Press.

In 2006 he filmed about 60% of his adaptation of Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts when the project was halted – his wife had fallen gravely ill and he left to care for her and their children. His wife died several months later.

Future projects include an original English language feature Epic, a Polish language feature Sister of Mercy and a Georgian/Russian-language film Kamo about the early career of Joseph Stalin. He is also set to direct a film loosely adapted from Douglas Kennedy’s novel The Woman in the Fifth, starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. —Wikipedia

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