| EAST-WEST Director: Régis Wargnier "I do not presume to denounce the dark years of the communist history in this film. I have nothing to add to the work of historians, but this film depicts the daily life of millions of human beings and simply recalls one thing: the Western conscience wasn't troubled by the Russian people's situation. The Iron Curtain suited us." Régis Wargnier East-West is yet another film to remind us that living in Stalin's Communist Russia was sheer hell. The film's prologue tells us that in 1946 Stalin invited Russian emigrants living in the west to come back home and participate in the reconstruction of Mother Russia, but what he was really doing was luring people back into the country so he could throw them into prison. Alexei (Oleg Menchikov) and his wife Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire), along with their son, arrive by ship from France to the shores of Russia. Immediately they encounter unconscionable horrors; almost everyone who arrives that day are locked-up or killed. Only Alexei's status as a medical doctor prevents him and his family from this fate. Everyone who enters the country is considered a spy and so the characters in this film begin to exist in a Kafkaesque world of intrigue and danger. After being interrogated and moved to a squalid communal apartment, Marie decides that her only goal is to escape and return to France. Alexei, though, realizes that there is no easy way ou. They must play the Communist game and earn their way to a respectful social situation at which point they can leave. The problem is that Alexei plays the part too well and he and Marie begin to drift apart. He has an affair with a Russian woman and Marie begins to hang out with a young swimmer, Sacha (Serguei Bodrov Jr), who has plans to help her get out of the country. As luck would have it -- since Marie is French -- she manages to make contact with a famous French actress (played by the indomitable Catherine Deneuve) who takes her cause to heart and tries to pull strings with the government and get her legally released. Director Régis Wargnier (who directed Indochine) does a good job with the set production and the look of the film and he gets many fine performances from the principle cast, each of whome have fully developed characters. Menchikov goes back and forth between phlegmatic good guy and stoic bad guy a few times and Bonnaire manages to be tough, cute and hopeful amid tears and grief. The film's weakness is its many predictable scenarios. In many scenes we are made to gasp at the horrible conditions and the evil schemes of the Communist officials and soldiers who slap Marie around. And by the end we are expected to cheer the sacrifices that are made to set her free. On the surface East-West is about the vicissitudes of survival and the way that the human spirit can bear the torch of patience and ultimately prevail. But underneath its humanist façade it's really a by-the numbers film about a privileged French woman who -- with a twist of luck -- manages to find her way out of a bad situation. This is all well and good, but the problem is that it just barely scratches the surface of what life means to the Russian people who, at that time, had nary a chance of escaping. - Matt Langdon |