justingmorrison This is a stylistically outstanding film, where Pavilkovsky pares down the usual omnipresent noise of the modern world and allows the protagonists to interact in controlled conditions, like a professor in a laboratory. The result is something uniquely beautiful that exists somewhere on the outskirts of modern film-making, at least from my humble perspective. In a sense, we feel as if we've been allowed access to world outside of our own, close to, but vitally different from ours. As a bad analogy, think of Reservoir Dogs, where Tarantino constructs a microcosm which looks familiar to us, but the events and the atmosphere within that microcosm are alien to us. (N.B. That is where parallels between the two films end!).Considine turns out another sublime performance, showing us his ability to court our empathy, and then throw it back in our face when his simmering rage boils over (see also A Room For Romeo Brass and My Summer Of Love). Dina Korzun provides the perfect foil as a picture of stoic vulnerability. She plays the role of mother, friend, struggling provider, lover, and jilted lover without ever missing a beat, and in a perfect world would have received an Oscar nomination for her role.To me, this film embodies the joy of film watching. You quickly realize that in order to appreciate it, you must surrender yourself to it and allow it to lead you where it will, unquestioningly. And the rewards are plentiful. For me, the beauty lies in the simplicity, the lack of hyperbole, the feeling that despite the director's attempts to present an abstracted vision of the modern world, he is still commenting heavily on it, and there is something within for us to reflect on. Hollywood could never, and perhaps would never, make a film like this, there's nothing in-your-face witty or clever about it, but as a reflection of a world that actually exists, it is absolutely uncanny.

hammy-3 Hot on the heels of news that the british are reputed to be the most rascist nation in the EU comes this elucidation of why that may be the case. A russian woman comes to england to meet her fiance and is only allowed in to the country if she applies for refugee status. told she has to stay in a detention centre for a year and a half and given only food vouchers and terrible accomodation to live on. At this point the movie could turn into a kafkaesque fable but instead is an ultra-naturalistic study of live in british emigration centres.It's a film that's cautiously optimistic about human nature, as a deus ex machina in the form of sweet, loving Paddy Consadine comes to save her from what he himself describes as a hell hole. This annoyed me a little bit; it seemed to be putting across the message that the english are really tolerant towards foreign immigrants and that it's "The System" that mistreats them. This seems a bit fanciful to me.One other thing that annoyed was that the only person to be hurt was an internet pornographer who pays the woman the equivalent of a month's wages back home for about an hour's striptease work. Is it really him that deserves to be hurt, and not the government, the immigration authorities, and the editors of rabble-rousing right-wing newspapers?But this is a warm, generous, beautifully shot, human film that i fear will never be seen by the people who need to see it most.

Alice Liddel When Jean-Luc Godard made '2 or 3 Things I know about her' in 1967, he was trying to capture the monumental soullessness of consumerist society as embodied in its high-rise tenements and the like. The problem was, as Eric Rohmer noted, Godard's camera couldn't help the ugly look beautiful. Something of the sort happens here. The Russian heroes are sent to a dismal English sea-resort, Stonehaven, in 'the armpit of the universe', its very name suggesting a negating of 'haven', refuge, home, by 'stone', architectural, bureaucratic. This is where all asylum seekers are stranded by the British government, their applications taking over a year to process. It is a literal prison, with fences, vigilant policemen, huge dogs, and surveillance cameras (pointedly compared to the porn monitors). In one alarming scene, the film stock changes to grainy video, following Tanya and Artyom as they try to leave for London. This seems like another stylistic affectation on the drector's part, but is quickly revealed to be part of a huge CCTV panel, with a faceless apparatchik watching every move; the pair are quickly picked up by the police. The streets are littered with bored packets of refugees, endlessly queuing for the one telephone, joylessly playing the gaming machines. As during the war, food is rationed, with vouchers to chippers where the battered fish contain no fish. this is all grim enough. But even if Stonehaven wasn't a refugee camp, it is still a sea-resort off-season, its amusements ostentatiously unused, tediously rusting, just lying there like beached whales. In this atmosphere, any sign of colour or sound - eg the gaming parlour - seems forced and artificial. Tanya's huge tower-block stands like a boil in this armpit. Stonehaven is like an economically deprived, northern town during the 80s, by the sea. Kids have nothing to do but smoke, get drunk , smash things, steal. The one thriving business in the town is an internet porn company. A horrible place, hell frozen over. You can imagine how a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach might film it, mercilessly emphasising its soul-destroying numbness. When Tanya first enters her designated flat, she looks out the window at the arcade, where 'Dreamland' is proclaimed in dull neon. The point seems laboriously obvious - if this is a dream, it is a nightmare, and I want to wake up. And yet, somehow, Pavlikovsky does make Stonehaven a dreamland: if not the land of your dreams, than certainly a land in your dreams. It's not just that these old dilapidated pleasure resorts have a perverse Benjaminian nostalgic beauty, not necessarily a reminder of former happiness, but of a former, failed idea of what might constitute happiness. It's not just that the mundane paraphernalia of a sea resort, such as the bright auburn carousel on top of a gaming machine, or the tacky colour of tatty wallpaper with a Malibu pattern, seem evocative. A lot of it has to do with the old cliche of looking at the everyday through new eyes. The very first sequence, as Tanya and Artyom sit in an airport luggage carousel waiting for the exit light, alerts us to the strangeness of the realism. Even dull shots emphasising immovable tedium, such as the repeated views of the tower-block, becomme magical, because of the different camera angles and the differing quality of the sky light. This light casts a very unEnglish colour over the misery throughout, breathtaking lilacs, blues and olives. The violence of the sea can break up the staticness of the image. Even something as oppressively routine as bingo night is made to seem alien, fantastic. That this is a transforming vision is suggested by Tanya's beautiful painting, which looks like an intricate Eastern tapestry, and suggests how something flat can have resonance. When she leaves, she takes her vision with her, but she leaves the painting with the already marvellously strange Alfie, hopefully galvanising him into a new way of looking at the world, as she/Pavlikovsky did us. That a journey into a strange land so harrowing, that a romance ending up unconsummated and in a shattering act of violence (reminiscent of Shane Meadows' films, but undermining his bleakness) should result in a film so uplifting, so heartening of spirit, is only one of Pavlikovsky's miraculous achievements.

Paul Creeden A glowing review of this film on the radio enticed me. The review, I recalled in retrospect, was about the film's technical points. I experienced the film as a sad and predictable home movie about a Russian woman and child, who simply do not know what they are doing with their lives. The one counterpoint character in the life-in-the-gulag story line, played very well by Paddy Considine, kept the film alive, in my opinion. I was impressed with the film's ending. There was a message about responsibility and self victimization that was very refreshing. I did not feel that the film offered entertainment, even in my broadest definition, but it did offer a look at poverty, brutish bureaucracy and the consequences of ignorance in the whole realm of illegal immigration. Perhaps it could be shown regularly at airports in developing countries.