Good
films come in small packages. Today's winner is Polish
writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski's fictional feature debut Last
Resort, a poignant Sad Sack tale of a young Russian mother and
her son cast adrift on foreign shores. The package is The Shooting
Gallery's third installment of independent films collectively
identified The Shooting Gallery Series at Loew's Entertainment, now
popping up in seventeen cities for two week runs with this British
entry as the first of six pictures this Spring. The stranger in a
strange land is Tanya Krushina (Dina Korzun), a stunning dark-haired
beauty who arrives in London nearly penniless but promisingly
engaged to Mark, a no-goodnik no-shownik. Hours, then days later,
she and her son Artiom are detained by British authorities when she
inadvertently asks for political asylum. And then her troubles
really begin.
They
are shipped off to a God forsaken bureaucratic wasteland, the
dilapidated seaside compound housing project cum concentration camp
Stonehaven, surrounded by guard dogs, a bank of video cameras,
barbed wire, and a sense of doom. Rising amidst it is a defunct
amusement park named Dreamland, where life for the many immigrants
imprisoned there is anything but cotton candy and flights of fancy.
The roller coaster towers over the area, but the only ride anyone
gets is the red-tape special. Even trains don't stop there anymore.
Accordingly, when Tanya learns her papers will be processed, she's
momentarily elated until she discovers it will take twelve to
sixteen months. Their barren flat offers limited relief. A settee
invested with fleas sits opposite a wall decorated with a tropical
paradise of palm trees, glistening sands, and golden sun. The
illusion is peeling away, however, and, taking a look out the window
paints a overcast sky filled with gray clouds of pessimism and
desperation. The sun never shines in this resort.
Celebrated
Russian star Korzun is a fresh face for Western audiences, cut from
an Emily Watson mold, both in looks and passion. Her Tanya is a
victim of cultural shell shock -- shy, insecure, yet in due course
determined to find a way out of her predicament as accidental
refugee. Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov) is a worldly nine-year-old with
Leonardo DiCaprio eyes, always aware that his mom's never-seen fiancé
is just a neurotic rat fink. He knows life would have been better if
they never left home; mom just wouldn't listen. The boy is a prime
candidate for dead-end juvenile delinquency if not for the attention
of bingo caller Alfie (Paddy Considine), the manager of a second
rate amusement arcade, its pinball lights the only brightness in
this gulag a stone's throw from civilization. Considine, whose
complex character study as borderline psycho Morell in A
Room for Romeo Brass was one of the best performances barely
seen by American audiences last year, takes his sophomore outing in Last
Resort as a compassionate sod, a loser amongst the lost. And
while he's ga-ga for the luckless Tanya, he spends an inordinate
amount of time with the boy, indoctrinating him the ways of the
western world and keeping him out of mischief with the local
riff-raff. Tanya's busy trying to earn some money to supplement the
meager food coupons provided her family, but it's only sleazebag
Internet porno pimp Les who's earmarking any funds for the scared
nymph. (Real life pornographer Lindsay Honey, drawing on his own
dastardly experiences, rounds out this nasty role, dare I say,
nicely.) On the verge of cybersex damnation, Tanya manages to gather
up enough courage to salvage her soul and her clothes, in the
process finding a friend and possible lover in Alfie.