Last Resort (2000): Paddy Considine, Margate and magic

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 11th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

I saw this film at the Renoir, an arthouse cinema near Russell Square in London, in 2001. I remember being attracted by a quote in the window, which I suspect was this one from Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review:

This is a British film with pertinent things to say about contemporary Britain, urgently and powerfully expressed in a cinematic language far from the callow, Lottery-nurtured idiom of Tepid Britannia comedy thrillers.

He might have added – as it was the year 2001 – that most of those tepid thrillers were directed by mockneys with expensive private educations.

And Bradshaw was right: Last Resort was a very good film. It offered a tender love story, political criticism and a portrait of contemporary Britain that made it seem at once familiar and strange.

Tanya (played by Dina Korzun), is a romantic Russian artist with two failed marriages behind her. She arrives at Heathrow with her 10-year-old son Artyom (Artyom Strelnikov) in tow, expecting to be met by her English fiancé. When she sees no sign of him at the airport, she panics and claims political asylum.

The authorities send Tanya and her son to a bleak seaside resort while her claim is considered - a process. she is told, that can will take “between 12 and 16 months”. Forbidden to leave the town, they are housed in a decaying tower block – the town is thick with barbed-wire fences and surveillance cameras. When Tanya finally manages to make contact with her fiancé from a phone box, he ends the relationship.

Artyom falls in with a gang of local children who smoke, drink and steal, while his mother tries to earn money from an online pornographer. When she tells the authorities she wants to withdraw her claim of asylum and go back to Russia, she is told that even this could take six months to process.

The two – first Artyom and then Tanya – are befriended by Alfie (Paddy Considine), a former prisoner who manages an amusement arcade in the town. He helps redecorate and refurnish their flat and takes them out for a day on the seafront. He and Tanya develop a romantic relationship, but she decides she has to stop dreaming and get back to Russia. (The more streetwise and cynical Artyom thinks they would be better off sticking with Alfie.)

So the three hide in a beached boat to defeat surveillance, and when the incoming tide lifts it they sail along the coast until they are well clear. Alfie arranges a lift to London for them and they part, with Tanya giving him the painting she had brought with her from Russia.

Dina Korzun and Artyom Strelnikov are both perfect for their roles, but the actor who stood out for me was Paddy Considine. I was so impressed that I will still watch a film just because he’s in it. I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect  it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.

A word too for Lindsay Honey, who plays the pornographer who offers Tanya work and makes him a human, even likeable, character. Honey, under the name Ben Dover, was a star of pornographic films, and is the father of Tyger Drew-Honey from Outnumbered. 

If Considine has a rival as the standout star of Last Resort, then it is Margate, the town where it was filmed. Since then, the Turner Gallery has been opened there, in the hope that it would spark an economic revival in what had once been a prosperous resort. The Dreamland pleasure park, seen lying near-derelict in Last Resort, has been revived too.

A year later, the star-packed cast of Last Orders were to arrive in Margate to shoot the final scenes of that film. One of them, David Hemmings, has been persuaded by his parents to enter a singing contest there and won it, which was the first spark of a career that saw him as a boy opera star and then a film actor and director.

Perhaps most remarkable of all is the way the film was shot by its director Pawel Pawlikowski:

When he first landed in Margate with his skeleton crew, Pawlikowski had little more than a loose semi-autobiographical story to go on. (He came to Britain from Poland with his family when he was 12). 

"Initially Alfie [played by Paddy Considine, a former boxer who made a startling screen debut in Shane Meadows's A Room for Romeo Brass] was to be a much more ambiguous, slightly threatened character, but the chemistry with Dina was magical. Paddy is a real phenomenon. 

We all lived together during the shoot, that is part of my method, so we were able to improvise scenes and come up with new ideas in the evening and over dinner. I am an insomniac, too, so I just kept writing all night sometimes. That is the way I like to work."

In other hands, you suspect, such an approach would result in a mess of a film, but Pawlikowski and his cast produced something magical.

In the 24 years since Last Resort was made, nothing has improved in the way Britain deals with asylum seekers. The last Conservative government effectively ceased processing applications at all in an attempt to stoke a sense of crisis that they hoped would benefit them at the polls.

This is what Pawlikowski found when he discovered the perfect location for his film:

"When I first when down to Margate, my first contact was with the Roma, the Gypsies, who were the only refugees really who interacted with the locals. Even with them, what struck me was how little their world extended beyond what they called Margatta. They would make epic journeys to a strange place at the far end of their known world called Greyvas End. 

"You don't have to be there long to realise that most of the asylum-seekers are clueless peasants. They are Kurds and Afghans mostly. Some have not even lived in cities before. They are all stunned, many don't move because they don't know what to do. 

"When the local Margate kids go round spitting at them, you can see their shock because they come from cultures were people have manners, where strangers receive hospitality. To me, they looked like they were living inside a Kafka story."

I will leave you with this clip of him talking about the remarkable film he made there.