Back in 1992, French director Regis Wargnier and star Catherine Deneuve had a huge international hit - and won the best foreign language film Oscar - with "Indochine," an unusual epic love story set against the political turmoil of post-World War II Vietnam. Their second collaboration, "East-West," is another formula-breaking, epic love story set in an Eastern country - the Soviet Union - after WWII, and seems, at first glance anyway, a rather calculated attempt to make lightning strike twice in the same place.
In a sense, it does. Deneuve's role this time is very much a supporting part and the film may have missed winning Wargnier a second Oscar last month, but it still manages to be both a harrowing adventure story and a tough-minded, ultimately very touching, epic romance.
It's the story of Alexei Golovine (Oleg Menshikov), a Russian-born doctor living in France who accepts Stalin's offer of amnesty to all Russian exiles at the end of the war, and returns to the Soviet Union with his French wife, Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and young son - eager to participate in the reconstruction of his Motherland.
But they soon find they've blithely waltzed into an Orwellian nightmare. Marie is interrogated, beaten and assumed to be a French spy by the KGB, every moment of their lives in Kiev is watched and reported upon, and the authorities brutally keep pressuring the couple to divorce.
The rest of the film traces their lives over many years, mainly from Marie's point of view, as she dreams of escape and has an affair with a young Olympic-class swimmer intent on defection (Serguei Bodrov Jr.). Alexi has his own affair with a communist loyalist and rises in the local party hierarchy.
The chilling evocation of the Stalinist USSR as a hell-on-earth is so effective that the film is often difficult to watch, and - surprisingly - the proceedings gain little from the presence of Deneuve, who finally comes in for the last act (as a French actress who tries to help Marie) and throws the movie off balance.
But, as disjointed and grinding as it is in places, it has a strong ending that absolves it of most of its sins. Like the end of "The Sixth Sense," it's totally unexpected and uniquely satisfying and forces us to suddenly reassess everything we've seen over the past two hours in a whole new light.
As he proved with "Indochine," Wargnier has a strong sense of the epic, a feel for the particular tragedy of the Cold War era, a gift for the hard-edged love story, and a way with actors, including Russian star Menshikov (a veteran of several Nikita Mikhalkov films), who is wonderfully Zhivago-esque as the enigmatic hero.
Bonnaire is even better. In a sense, "East-West" has the sensibility of a Hollywood "woman's picture" of the '40s - the weepie saga of a married woman trapped in an untenable situation - and this gifted French star pulls it off with a long-suffering but charismatic performance worthy of a Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Olivia de Havilland.

Submitted by Kay