The French king of cinematic soap opera, Regis Wargnier, is back with another film. His overheated "Indochine", starring Catherine Deneuve and Vincent Perez, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1992 and was a hit with foreign film audiences who like a little history and a lot of soup with their subtitles. His next foray, "Une Femme Francaise" (1994), was an embarrassingly autobiographical account of his mother's unfortunate penchant for sleeping with other men while his military father was off fighting various wars.
"East-West" employs the same formula of wildly passionate love affairs set against a grand historical backdrop, to the same unsatisfying effect. This time it's the start of the Cold War, in 1946, and chummy Uncle Joe Stalin has invited all the Soviet expatriates living in the West to come back to help rebuild the fatherland. Dr. Alexei Golovine (played by the delightful Oleg Menshikov, one of the few bright lights in Nikita Mikhalkov's 1999 Cannes disaster, "The Barber of Siberia") swallows the bait and leads his unsuspecting wife Marie (played by the incomparable French veteran, Sandrine Bonnaire) and their young son back to Mother Russia. For their loyalty, they are imprisoned, beaten, and made to live generally horrible lives in an unspeakably crowded apartment. Police informers are easier to find than food, and as Alexei, over the years, sleeps with various high-ranking female Communist officials to protect his family and ameliorate their situation, Marie turns increasingly toward a young Russian dissident (played by Sergei Bodrov, Jr., from the excellent "Prisoners of the Mountain", directed by his father) for solace. Her indomitable spirit, in Wargnier's teary portrait, can never be finally repressed, and she fights for years on end for repatriation to her beloved France.
There were undoubtedly millions who suffered under Stalin's brutal reign, and "East-West" could have been an interesting film about that. Even the focus on a French woman (despite the fact that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of more than 30 million of his own countrymen) is completely understandable. But Wargnier's screenplay is so hammy and so ultra melodramatic that you quickly find yourself tuning out. (One improbable moment, injected purely for suspense, has the young, lard-slicked Russian swimming 6 miles through the ocean to escape to the West while Marie is being brutally interrogated concerning his whereabouts.) The film does improve dramatically (in both senses of the word) when Catherine Deneuve appears as a visiting French diva who takes an interest in Marie's plight after the latter slips her a forbidden note following a performance. But by then even the good moments feel hollow and forced.
Wargnier is also a lousy storyteller who seems not to understand how to shape a narrative. All of his films try to compress too many events and too much time and the result is a dispiriting series of title inserts saying "Six years later," "15 years later," "three years later," and so on. Not surprisingly, the music is bombastic and shameless in demanding emotion from the spectator. Worst of all, Wargnier's unnuanced vision of postwar USSR and its inhabitants seems to have popped up unscathed from a 1950's B film: everyone's either a self-righteous spy, a quivering coward, or a total bully without a hint of humanity. The nasty fellows from the KGB are so evil that they indulge in every cliche possible short of actually twisting their mustaches.
Wargnier is so intent on beating you into an emotional pulp that you do find yourself getting emotionally involved in Marie's final attempted flight to freedom. But it's against your better judgment.

Submitted by Kay