The films of renowned French director Regis Wargnier tell the stories of damsels in distress, and his latest "East-West" is no exception.

A French girl with a strangely spiritual visage, that of Sandrine Bonnard, was stupid enough to run away to Stalinist Russia with her Russian husband - understandable considering that the latter is Oleg Menshikov. The act of emigre Romanticism was severely punished, however: Shoved into a communal apartment full of neighbors aching to rat on them to the authorities, constantly shadowed by shady individuals, subjected to repression after repression, the opportunity to inhale the sweet air of Parisian freedom seemingly vanished forever. All their combined powers of inventiveness had to be mustered up to make the breakout from the paradise of communism even a vague hope.
It was hardly much easier for the more conscientious and sympathetic denizens sharing the kommunalka, also forever dreaming of how to leave their cruel Motherland. The couple's friend and neighbor, played by Sergei Bodrov Jr., had to develop a bodybuilder's musclebound frame and swim nearly all the way across the Black Sea. But all these miracles would have been utterly fruitless had our heroes not employed the services of the touring diva of strong progressive convictions, coincidentally from Paris herself, and who just happens to have the ravishing good looks of Catherine Deneuve. Despite the sneers of its many snobbish detractors, "East-West" is a fine movie, with a conscience clear for all to see, of considerable production values, and one which captures precisely the emotions of the epoch it depicts. And although a nitpicker could find in it lots of historical inaccuracies and plot details that stretch belief, in all fairness they are no worse than those found in the films of many Russian directors imagining themselves to be experts on all things Russian. Wargnier never puts on such airs, and himself warded off the early negative critical reactions thus: "What can one expect from someone who's been awarded an Oscar? Surely only more miracles..."
French cinema, with the exception of perhaps two or three highly impressive examples, has always lacked a sense of historicism, and especially indeed historical accuracy. Ever since his Oscar-laden "Indochine" (also starring la Deneuve), Wargnier has employed the method of skilfully recreating great historical events, all the while exploiting the modern public's weakness for exotica, especially the Eastern variety, and the enormous colonial nostalgia of the French public in particular.
The exotica in this movie that attracted the director to his usual end of the earth, are of a decidedly different sort, however. "Oh, East is East, and West is West," Rudyard Kipling's oft quoted musing, is here translated by Regis Wargnier from its theoretical and poetical roots to a more trivial and political layer of meaning. But "East-West" turns out to be nonetheless interesting and worthy of our attention. Maybe not so much as a work of art by one of France's most distinguished filmmakers of modern times, nor as a taste of Europe trying to do Hollywood, or as an experiment in transglobal coproduction, but more as a political statement of beliefs.
Because in truth this picture falls not into the Oscar but into the Chechen context. The question of human rights so beloved by the French is no longer interpreted first and foremost as relating to the repressive activities of previous Soviet regimes. The French in any case are firmly convinced that nowadays Europe is stalked not by the specter of Communism (which they in their time also happened to encourage) but by the terror of current Russian actions upon its own people and in its own territory. The French intellectuals' letter is titled thus: "Terror Stalks Europe." Regis Wargnier does not number among the ranks of the declaration's signatories, but his latest movie very much addresses the hot topic at hand: Violence lives in the bones of this country and holds its very skeleton together.
Russia may be a monster, but the people you come across in it are really not that bad. Similarly, in principle all people are really not that bad, and kommunalka stool-pigeons, like the one played in the film by Tatyana Dogileva, are in fact merely victims of circumstance. The French are certainly no strangers to this kind of circumstance, as attested to by the record number of denunciations and collaborators who flourished under the Vichy government at the time of France's comparatively liberal Nazi occupation.
So East and West really can meet perhaps. On the common ground of meanness. But also on that of compassion, justice, and striving for freedom. And this last is precisely the overriding message of Wargnier's creditable film.

Submitted by Sanochki