EAST-WEST. - Review - movie review

Directed by Regis Wargnier

The story of Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a French woman who emigrates to Odessa when her Russian husband is drawn back to his homeland by Stalin's 1946 propaganda-driven amnesty and finds herself billeted in a claustrophobic "kommunalka," is as grim as one might expect it to be. At least until the movie turns into a romance, between Marie and a seventeen-year-old swimmer (heartthrob Serguei Bodrov Jr.), and then into a Russia House-style thriller, with Marie attempting to escape to the West with the help of a sympathetic French actress played by Catherine Deneuve. Wargnier (Indochine) manages to orchestrate these genre shifts without sacrificing the integrity of his historical drama--but it's a fine line. The film is strongest in its analogizing of personal and political betrayal--and in Bonnaire's typically raboned performance.

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