Last Resort (2001)

As the world turns and buckles and shifts, it creates barely visible global fault lines -- new places where people may slip between the cracks of life. The moving and eerily beautiful Last Resort unfolds in one of these no man's land crevices.

It's set in a former seaside resort, somewhere in England, that has been turned into a vast crumbling holding station for refugees. The place is called Stonehaven (how's that for an oxymoron?), and it has glum apartments, concrete walkways, and one depressingly literal bright spot -- a noisy, if mostly empty, arcade. Imagine a bombed out Coney Island at twilight, and you'll have some idea of the ironic shimmer of ''Last Resort.''

Into this desolation row arrives Tanya (Dina Korzun), a young single mother from Moscow who has journeyed to England to rendezvous with her British fiancé. When he never shows up at the airport, she is sent to Stonehaven along with her 9 year old son (Artiom Strelnikov), and they are ordered to wait there... for six to nine months. ''Last Resort,'' as written and directed by Poland's Pawel Pawlikowski in a style that suggests a more lyrical Ken Loach, is a genuine snapshot of what's going on in the U.K. right now. Tanya, with her broken English, is wooed by the arcade manager, a handsome drifter (Paddy Considine) who is drawn to her softness, and what happens between them is enough to suffuse this fragile and melancholy anecdote with something like hope.

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