Potent Elements Combine in Haunting ‘Last Resort’

“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.

Written and directed in English by Pawel Pawlikowski, a Pole who works largely in Britain, “Last Resort” was a consistent award winner at festivals throughout Europe. It’s also the latest feature (the British “Croupier” and the French “Human Resources” were among the previous choices) to be distributed as part of the Shooting Gallery Film Series, which has become as reliable a brand name as the international independent film world has.

Using a neo-documentary style as well as a Mike Leigh-influenced workshop method that allows the actors to have a hand in developing their own dialogue, “Last Resort” combines Leigh’s concern for truth with Ken Loach’s social realism and Pawlikowski’s own involving visual point of view.

“Last Resort” is also striking because it’s chosen the world of political refugees searching for asylum as its milieu. 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.

Tanya (Russian actress Dina Korzun) calls herself “a refugee by accident.” We meet her at London’s Heathrow Airport, newly arrived from the old country with her 10-year-old son, Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov), who reads to his mother from guidebooks sunnily promising “In Britain, friendly people start conversations by talking about the weather.”

Actually getting into Britain, however, proves more difficult. Tanya and her son have arrived with only $85 and no visible means of support. She tells the immigration authorities she’s supposed to be met by her fiance, but he doesn’t show up. Increasingly distraught to the point of panic, not really knowing what she’s getting into, Tanya suddenly decides to apply for political asylum for herself and her son.

What she’s asked for is a one-way ticket to a bleak, crowded seaside high-rise that serves as a holding area for asylum seekers. It’s a lonely, isolated tower, surrounded by fences and even barbed wire, located next to a distressed amusement park whose brazen “Dreamland Welcomes You” sign mocks them with its unconvincing civility.

Only gradually does Tanya realize the kind of Kafkaesque situation she’s embroiled herself in. She’s trapped in a bureaucratic maze, unable to go anywhere until her case is decided, a process that could take 12 to 16 months. “You’re joking,” she tells the official who gives her this piece of news. He’s not.

Unlike Tanya, Alfie (Paddy Considine of “A Room for Romeo Brass”) is in the Dreamland vicinity by choice, not necessity. A former boxer who manages an amusement arcade by day and calls bingo by night, Alfie has exiled himself to what he calls “the armpit of the universe” because in its own way his life was not working out any better than Tanya’s.

An all-or-nothing romantic addicted, her son says, to loving men who make her cry, Tanya doesn’t know what to make of Alfie, whose decency seems genuine and whose trustworthiness soon makes a friend of young Artiom. Increasingly distraught and emotional, she catches the eye of the slimy Les (Lindsey Honey), who dangles the possibility of sexually explicit modeling on the Internet as an ultimate kind of safe--and potentially lucrative--sex.

Perhaps because they helped create their roles, both the expressive, vulnerable Korzun and the matey Considine are quietly compelling, as is Honey, described in the press material as something of a pornographer in real life as well.

Though it is only 75 minutes, “Last Resort,” nicely metaphorical title and all, is a quite impressive film. Pawlikowski (working with cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski and co-writer Rowan Joffe) has the restraint necessary to hit all his notes just right. This is the best class of poetic realism, the kind you can believe in without a trace of hesitation.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: mature subject matter and some sexual situations.

‘Last Resort’

Dina Korzun: Tanya

Artiom Strelnikov: Artiom

Paddy Considine: Alfie

Lindsey Honey: Les

A BBC Films production, released by Shooting Gallery. Director Pawel Pawlikowski. Producer Ruth Caleb. Executive producers David M. Thompson, Alex Holmes. Screenplay Pawel Pawlikowski. Co-writer Rowan Joffe. Cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski. Editor David Charap. Costumes Julian Day. Music Max de Wardener with Roman Oliver. Production design Tom Bowyer. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

In limited release.