EAST-WEST (Est-Ouest) A-
France Russia Ukraine
Bulgaria Spain (124 mi)
1999 d: Régis Wargnier
The second half of the 20th century saw unprecedented horror
from the Nazi propagated Holocaust during World War II, one of the worst
atrocities in history by attempting to eradicate an entire people on racial
grounds, systematically singling out only Jewish people to exterminate. But most historians agree that Josef Stalin
likely killed more people than Hitler, where tens of millions were sent to the
endless wastes of the Siberian Gulag.
But even Stalin doesn’t hold the distinction of being the most genocidal
leader of the 20th century, as that would be Mao Zedong of China,
who is thought to be responsible for the deaths of over 40 million people, most
attributable to famine, forced labor, starvation, and execution. Having said that, what’s unique to this film
is tackling a subject rarely dealt with in the history books, namely the fate
of thousands of Russians who fled the Soviet Union after the Russian
Revolution, who were lured back in the summer of 1946 by Stalin’s offer of an
amnesty where they were supposedly needed in the reconstruction of a nation
decimated by war. Returning émigrés
Alexei (Oleg Menchikov), a Russian trained doctor who had been living in France
decides to return to help his homeland accompanied by his French wife Marie
(Sandrine Bonnaire) and their 7-year old son.
Far from the glorious return to a welcoming country they expected, they were
instead greeted by a harsh military force and separated into two lines, death
or imprisonment, where most were executed as “imperialist spies.” Only the professionals, whose skills are
needed, are allowed to remain alive, where the Soviets are suspicious of all
these new arrivals, treating them with open suspicion and hostility, stripping
Marie of her French passport, where their activities are carefully monitored by
the KGB and local communist citizens who threaten at any time to turn them in
to authorities. Wargnier, a French screenwriter
and filmmaker, Louis Gardel, a French novelist and screenwriter born in
Algiers, Sergei Bodrov, a Russian screenwriter and director (who son plays a
major role in the film), and Rustam Ibragimbekov, a Russian, Azerbaijani
screenwriter and playwright, go to considerable lengths to recreate the
realities for ordinary people in the post-war Stalinist system.
Told with a Spielberg, Hollywood epic sweep, France's entry
for this year's Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film, you’d think this
would fall into the melodramatic, over-the-top category, seemingly modeled on
the war-time romance of DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), and while there are a bit too many
Russians who also conveniently happen to speak French, the romance is actually
submerged into the historical reality, as the film doesn’t overplay the
emotions and takes a surprising interest in the individual lives affected and in
developing character, where the acting throughout is superb, as is the
production design, where the choice of locations can be stunning, contrasting
the immense grandiosity of the architecture in the spacious government
buildings against the tiny, claustrophobic rooms allotted to citizens. Shot on location in Kiev,
in the Ukraine,
and Sofia, Bulgaria,
the director captures a real sense of desperation and futility, where the
bleakness of this family’s trapped existence is really no different than that
of other ordinary citizens, as all suffer during Stalin’s reign. Transported to Kiev,
Alexei is employed as a medical officer in a large textile factory, where everyday
existence in the Soviet Union is permeated with the
presence of the secret police, in particular the heightened xenophobia that
runs rampant from ordinary citizens to the ruling apparatus, where everyone
falls under suspicion. The family is
consigned to a small, cramped room in a squalid communal house of drunken unemployed
men, where one of the lodgers possesses keys to all the mail boxes and has the
task of checking everyone’s letters on a regular basis. Marie is horrified and immediately vows to
find a way back to France,
but without a passport, they are trapped behind the Iron Curtain and imprisoned
to involuntary servitude, where she is contemptuously treated like a foreign
spy, and the only reason they remain alive is Alexei’s considerable medical
skills. When the elderly Russian
landlady of the house is caught singing a French song with Marie, she is
rounded up by the KGB agents and imprisoned for consorting with a foreign spy,
dying shortly afterwards, where her son Sasha (Sergei Bodrov Jr.) is about be
thrown out into the streets. Without a
word of discussion, Marie insists they can make room for him, where Sasha
becomes like an older brother to their own son, but Alexei is disturbed by the
continual lack of privacy at home and how he’s continually hounded at work to
prove his Soviet credibility.
The film consistently supports multiple storylines that
occasionally interconnect, extended through time, given a near historic reach,
where a traveling French theatrical troupe happens to be visiting Kiev and
Marie desperately bursts into the dressing room of the star, Catherine Deneuve
as Gabrielle Develay, known for her leftist political leanings, and hands her a
letter to give to the French Consulate in France, an act Gabrielle can’t ignore. With the KGB agents literally at her door,
this turns into a tricky situation, as it puts Marie’s husband in a vulnerable
position, as he can’t afford to offend the Communist regime. He’s fraught with his own personal travails,
as due to his wife’s inattention, he sleeps with the Soviet landlady in the
building, immediately kicked out by Marie, so instead he moves in across the
hall with his mistress. When the
Communists hear about this, it all sounds so French to them, urging him to
divorce his wife and receive a large apartment as compensation. Sasha figures into his own storyline, as he’s
a world class swimmer that falls for Marie, dropped from the swim team due to
his lethargy after his grandmother’s death, where Marie revives his training
regimen swimming in the Dnieper River,
where he rubs his body with lard to protect him from the cold. Eventually he is welcomed back to the team
where his skills may allow him to defect to the West, and perhaps free Marie from
France. The splendid cinematography from Laurent
Dailland is impressive, while the soundtrack by Patrick Doyle is equally
enthralling at times, powerful and dramatic, feeling much like a rhapsodic
Rachmaninov piano concerto, where the intensity rises at times to the level of
a thriller. As the film leaps forward in
large blocks of time, their initial hopes are continually thwarted and slowly
dissipate, while their weary lives seem to move at a glacier pace, where the
bleakness of the Stalinist state retains the upper hand, where it’s in the Russian
blood to endure hardships, characterized by long suffering. Except for a few brief scenes, the film
unwinds entirely in the Soviet Union, advancing into an era when Stalin actually
increased his nationalist fervor, including his anti-Semitic belligerence by
rounding up the remaining Jews and sending them to Gulags, while also renewing show
trials, intensifying the purges, pogroms, mass enslavement, and murder. Yet throughout it all, this is an emotionally
compelling story of would-be survivors with differing cultural instincts in
play, where Alexei and Marie are two extremely resourceful and complex
individuals whose enduring relationship evolves into larger-than-life feelings,
where the Soviet Army Choir echoes thunderously throughout the journey.
