From Last Resort to Ida: The Unattainable ‘Home’

[Spoiler alert]

Last Resort and Ida tell stories of female protagonists who are caught up in intricate tangles of identity crises. Young and aspiring, they already endure the weight of origin, family ties, romantic love, and the yearn for self-fulfilment. Set in the era of the Cold War, Last Resort follows the story of a Russian single mother, Tanya, who brings her son, Artyom, to the UK with the hope of reuniting with her fiancé. Yet, upon realising that no one was to pick them up in the airport, Tanya decides to claim asylum in order to enter the British border. Locked in a dehumanising and confining refugee camp in a desolate town, the two of them struggle with solitude and the urge of assuming authority in the mother-and-son relationship. Made thirteen years later, Ida is set in the early 60s and dwells on the heart-wrenching history of Poland. It takes us through the story of Ida, a novice, who suddenly learns that she has a Jewish aunt and that because of her descent, she is unable to become a nun. A root-seeking quest with her aunt, Wanda, then ensued, where Ida learns of the gruesome tragedies of her parents during the Holocaust. Confounded by the disillusion with faith and a newly opened up life of sensuality, Ida undergoes a rigorous soul-searching of where her heart lies.

While watching Last Resort, I could not help comparing it with a documentary. Through the hustling hand-held camera, we follow and empathise with the helpless Tanya and Artyom as they are rudely pushed into a car that drives them to the refugee camp. Low-resolution CCTV screen shots show how the perplexed mother and son wander in the labyrinth of the prison, only to trigger the security alarm set in a close network of surveillance. The scenes are so realistically enacted that it is as if we are not only watching Tanya’s story, but also that of tens of thousands of asylum seekers. And Paweł Pawlikowski shares this experience personally. Born in Warsaw in 1957, Pawlikowski moved to the UK at the age of fourteen, where he received his education and established his career. The English-speaking Last Resort was produced in the UK and distributed by BBC. After his wife passed away, Pawlikowski moved back to Warsaw, where he completed his Polish debut Ida, which won the Oscar Award for Foreign Language Films. Unlike Last Resort, Ida is an intimate drama that does not embody a transnational theme, but issues of cultural shock and the complexity of identity recur here. Set in communist Poland in which citizens started to receive Western pop culture with curiosity and readiness, the film oscillates between different imaginations of the East and West, namely, a choice between self-restrained pursuit of faith and a decadent materialist way of life. Subtly, Pawlikowski narrates this contrast through Ida’s internal struggle. When first exposed to the spectacles of life outside the convent, Ida is sceptical. Wanda, a sensualist and disillusioned Marxist, tries to encourage Ida to unleash herself and attempt corporal desire. Ida firmly defends religious abstinence, but the insistent Wanda suggests reading a passage from the Bible about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Vexed, Ida abruptly breaks off the conversation. Captured in a long shot with austere dialogue, the under-dramatised conflict highlights Ida’s confusion and frustration at the crossroad of her life path. Filmed in black-and-white still tableaus, Ida has an elegant tranquillity in it, with haunting undercurrents of anxiety and confusion.

Is the West troubling in the eyes of these outlanders? Pawlikowvski departs from typical Eastern bloc directors who often depict the West as essentially detestable. Rather, in these films, it is through romantic relationships that characters form an attachment to the foreign way of life. When Ida, standing at the spiral staircase and beside the curvy window frame in the bar listening to jazz, she is fascinated by the novel glamour that starkly contrast with the rigid convent. At this moment, she falls in love with a handsome saxophonist. Ida takes a leap into the secular life, thinking that by uniting with her boyfriend, maybe she can turn a new leave. Likewise, Tanya starts a relationship with Alfie, a British man, who is already assuming the role Artyom’s father. However, after the protagonists experience the Western way of life and find it unsuitable for their individual pursuit, even love is unable to keep them. After their first night together, Ida realises that their relationship is leading to no future. The next morning, she puts on her novice gown and treads along the road in the countryside. On the other hand, Tanya rejuvenates her passion for drawing and decides to return to Russia to fulfil her dream, which means that she has to break up with Alfie. This leads to one of the rare emotional moments in Last Resort when we see through a close zoom-in shot with the enlarged teary faces of Tanya and Alfie, who embrace and weep on their last night together. The decision to leave is not another refuge from the hostile foreign place, but a painstaking break from a newly formed bondage with it.

Having lost their home, does ‘home’ exist anymore to our heroines? The films do not provide an answer to this, except ending with the ladies marching their way of ‘return’.

Last Resort and Ida are unusual because they refuse to close with a clichéd ending where protagonists finally return to the embrace of the East. Instead of reaching a definite destination, the protagonists are on their way as the films end. Last Resort ends with a long shot depicting Tanya and Artyom travelling towards the airport terminal, synchronised with sounds of the moving carriage, then fading to white with fairy-tale like music. The ‘home’ never appears, but at least is enough to know that they are returning their place of origin. In Ida, however, the idea of ‘home’ is even more ambivalent. Is Ida going back to the convent or somewhere else? There is not even a hint on the destination. The answer may be open to imagination, but one thing is clear: that by leaving her dress behind with her lover, Ida renounces the ephemeral sensualist way of life without the yearn for a meaning. The last two shots of the film that depict Ida on her way are the only moving shots in the film. The tracking shots and handheld movements initiate a momentum unfound in previous scenes, suggesting Ida’s empowerment. What makes Ida different from Last Resort is that Ida goes beyond the geographical border between binaries of ‘home’ and a new ‘alternative place’. Perhaps, what is important is not where Ida heads for, but her coming-of-age as she finds the agency to determine a life she wants. Intriguingly, as Pawlikowski moves closer to his homeland in his film-making practice, the idea of ‘home’ becomes more obscure in his work. There may not need to be such a place as ‘home’, as long as one knows the way.

Final shot of Last Resort

Final shot of Ida

17 May 2020 Shatin