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- Title
‘Welcome to Dreamland’: The realist impulse in Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort.
- Authors
Bardan, Alice
- Abstract
After first exploring Pawel Pawlikowski's status as an outsider in British cinema through a brief comparison to German director Fatih Akin, I focus on Pawlikowski's film Last Resort (UK, 2000) to assess and problematize its portrayal of refugees. I argue that rather than relying on open didacticism, Pawlikowski's representation of asylum seekers defies the established conventions of the genre, highlighting the fragility of hospitable conventions. Neither portraying them as despairing victims lacking agency nor commending them as virtuous ‘heroes’ (as if by default), Last Resort does not allow its spectators an easy access to the spectacle of the Others' suffering. Instead, it points to the discrepancy between the projected image of Britain as a welcoming country and the exclusions through which it operates. Moreover, the focus on a Russian woman's narrative provides the opportunity to open up a discussion on how whiteness is negotiated in a European context. Given that a majority of films portray Britain as a utopian land strongly desired by migrants, Pawlikowski's significant intervention is that he ultimately presents it as a ‘counter-utopia’, a space from which one wishes to escape. Since Pawlikowski's ‘poetic realism’ has been aligned with that of Michael Winterbottom's, in the last part of the article I discuss Last Resort in conjunction with Winterbottom's Wonderland (UK, 1999).
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; PAWLIKOWSKI, Pawel, 1957-; LAST Resort (Film); GREAT Britain in motion pictures; IMMIGRANTS in motion pictures; RACE in motion pictures; REALISM in motion pictures; AKIN, Fatih, 1973-; WINTERBOTTOM, Michael, 1961-; MOTION pictures
- Publication
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2008, Vol 6, Issue 1, p47
- ISSN
1474-2756
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/ncin.6.1.47_1