Beyond the Nation State: ‘New Europe’ and Discourses of British Identity in Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort (2000)

Abstract

The collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989 and the 2004 and 2007 extensions of the European Union to include several Eastern European countries have suddenly changed the Iron Curtain coexistence of West and East into East/West literal encounters in Europe. It is these changes in population, pan-European encounters and a redefined notion of Europe, especially Britain's place in the ‘New Europe’, that are explored and examined in Last Resort (2000). Although the film avoids overt political engagement, its story of a Russian mail order bride, which is clearly a metaphor for the West/East relationship of power and privilege, should be read within the contemporary political debate on the changing nature of European identity and, more specifically, the place of British identity in the redefined social, economic and political situation of the ‘New Europe’.

Keywords:

• ‘New Europe’
• East/West encounters
• British identity
• Pawel Pawlikowski
• Last Resort

Notes

¹ The narrative is unclear about Tanya's reason for coming to Great Britain. The plausible explanation is that she is a mail order bride, but it is never stated openly and we never know if she had met Mark before.

² The term was coined when Anderson, Reisz, Mazzetti and Richardson, having difficulty screening their films, decided to publicize them by showing them at a screening programme for the National Film Theatre.

³ It was often the case under Communism that the workforce was forciby relocated to places where plants had been built. It often created a gender imbalance, which we can see in Loves of a Blonde, in which the shoe factory employs mainly women. It is this problem which the factory's social director, Prkorny (Josef Kolb), tries to solve at the beginning of the narrative by arranging for troops to visit the town.

⁴ A similar function of romance as a way of escape(ism) from ideological constraints (of patriarchy) for women has been noted by Janice Radway in her book Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Radway, 1991, p. 90).

⁵ Incidentally, the main characteristic of most of these films' visual style is their black and white photography to convey the gloomy nature of the existence of the block's residents, which Pawlikowski also follows in his choice of only subdued colours in Last Resort.