East-West
France/Russia/Bulgaria/Spain 1999
Reviewed by Michael Witt
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The USSR, 1946. Responding to Stalin's attempts to lure back Russian emigrants to their homeland, young doctor Alexeï Golovin, his French wife Marie and their son Sérioja arrive in Odessa from France. Many of their fellow returnees are tortured, executed or deported to forced labour camps. Alexeï is allocated a room in a communal apartment in Kiev and made responsible for the health of the workforce in a local factory. He considers any form of resistance dangerous, while Marie remains fixated on escape. At a performance given by a visiting French theatre troupe, Alexeï is paraded by the authorities as a returnee from the west who has turned into a model Soviet citizen. Marie tells celebrated actress Gabrielle Develay of her unhappiness.
The family drifts apart: Alexeï embarks on an affair and Marie takes a lover, teenager Sacha. Implicated in Sacha's escape to the west, Marie is sent to the Gulag. After Stalin's death six years later, she is released. A further two years on, Alexeï and Gabrielle orchestrate Marie and Sérioja's escape to the west via the French embassy in Bulgaria. Alexeï is sent to a labour camp to work as a doctor. He has to wait until the dawn of the Gorbachev era 30 years later before rejoining his family in France.
Review
Following the only modest success of his 1994 study of an army marriage Une femme française, director Régis Wargnier returns in East-West to the slick wide-angle historical melodrama of his earlier hugely popular Indochine (1991). In East-West he sets himself the daunting task of grappling with four decades of Soviet history and east-west relations through the vehicle of a simple love story. At the heart of the film is the relationship between Oleg Menchikov's Russian doctor Alexeï, who settles in the USSR just after World War II, and his French wife Marie, the superb Sandrine Bonnaire here making a rare but welcome foray into mainstream cinema.
Wargnier is at his most comfortable exploring marital love in its various guises: young passion, physical desire, the onset of antagonism and a mature sense of mutual support and self-sacrifice. The pent-up energy and erotic charge of the human body (in particular, the muscular physique of Sacha, the young swimming champion with whom Marie has an affair) provide a counterpoint to the monotony of the Soviet regime, conveyed by the blue-grey hue that pervades the imagery. Wargnier uses water motifs in a similar way: a constant reminder of loss and separation (Marie and Alexeï arrive in the USSR by boat from France), the swimming scenes at the pool and lake offer visual relief from the drab Kiev backdrop and cumulative sense of claustrophobia and surveillance in the couple's cramped apartment. This symbolic treatment of water and of the human body culminates in the beautifully shot and edited central escape sequence in which Sacha braves the dangerous seas in his bid for freedom.
East-West is pitched unashamedly as a broad-brushstroke historical melodrama. But the historical part of the equation is underdeveloped. Wargnier pays lip service to key dates and introduces a sprinkling of stock figures from Cold War mythology, but these aren't enough to provide any credible sense of the reality of daily life in the USSR in the late 40s. The Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian cast members lend a superficial air of authenticity to the film's unabashedly cartoonish sensibility (Alexeï doesn't work in any old factory; he works in one which produces red flags!). But it doesn't help that Wargnier recycles familiar images of heel-clicking leather-coated KGB baddies shouting "don't let them escape".
Wargnier's attempt to portray this relatively uncharted slice of recent history is, of course, inherently presumptuous; but faced with the task, his film is low on humility. It deploys stylistic grandiosity - as in the irritating recurrent use of unmotivated slow camera tracks - that speaks more of an aimless and distasteful display of manufactured gravitas than of a sensitive approach to historical realities.
Credits
- Director
- Régis Wargnier
- Producer
- Yves Marmion
- Screenplay
- Sergueï Bodrov
- Roustam Ibraguimbekov
- Louis Gardel
- Régis Wargnier
- Director of Photography
- Laurent Dailland
- Supervising Editor
- Hervé Schneid
- Production Designers
- Vladmir Svetozarov
- Alexeï Levtchenko
- Music
- Patrick Doyle
- ©UGC YM/France 3 Cinéma/NTV Profit/
Gala Films Ltd/
Mate Productions- Production Companies
- UGC YM presents a
- UGC YM/France 3 Cinéma/NTV Profit/
Gala Films Ltd/
Mate Productions co-production - Supported by Eurimages
- With the participation of Sofinergie 5/Canal+/
Centre National de la Cinématographie - With the support of Procirep
- Executive Producers
- Studio 1 + 1:
- Alexandre Rodniansky
- Gala Films Ltd:
- Galina Toneva
- Stephan Kyrilov
- Sofilm:
- Patrick Sandrin
- NTV Profit, Moscow:
- Evgueni Guindilis
- Co-ordinators
- NTV Profit, Moscow:
- Ilya Ognev
- Ludmila Mikhailova
- Associate Producers
- Mate Productions:
- Mate Cantero
- Stéphane Sorlat
- NTV Profit:
- Igor Tolstounov
- Production Managers
- Gérard Crosnier
- Andreï Belous
- Unit Managers
- Pierre-Laurent Nicolas
- François Pulliat
- Larissa Khaliapina
- Yuna Lemasson
- Stéphane Weibel
- Irina Kojema
- Dimitri Kojema
- Alexandre Tchetirkine
- Denis Khaliapine
- Dimitar Nikolov
- Stefan Kyrilov
- Erwan Riou
- Fabien Capdeville
- Gonzague Isle de Beauchaine
- Olivier Lejort
- Karine Raphaël
- Bourian Tchompolov
- Philippe Philipov
- Ivan Kyrilov
- Alexandre Marinov
- Anatoly Tchouiko
- Vitalik Belous
- Production Consultant
- Maroussia Tochkova
- Assistant Directors
- Christophe Cheysson
- Delphine Bonnemason
- Vladimir Kapitonenko
- Victor Bojinov
- Alexis Loukakis
- Alexia Hebert de Beauvoir
- Vera Zoubtsova
- Script Supervisor
- Isabelle Delage
- Casting
- Gérard Moulévrier
- Alexandre Kossev
- Nathaniele Esther Benchimoun
- Zinaida Mamontova
- Camera
- Olivier Banon
- Pascal-Jérôme Peyrebrune
- Catherine Pujol
- Christophe Paturance
- Océane Lavergne
- Sergeï Panteleiev
- Alexandre Zlatev
- Underwater:
- Roland Savoye
- Michel Revest
- Pascal Morisset
- Titles:
- Olivier Banon
- Digital Effects/
3D Sequences - Médialab
- Editors
- Isabelle Proust
- Eric Dardill
- Liza Ignazi
- Art Directors
- Rossitsa Bakeva
- Jean-Philippe Reverdot
- Svetlana Filakhtova
- Mikhail Levtchenko
- Yvetta Kotcheva
- Tsvetana Yankova
- Garabed Garabedian
- Storyboard Artist
- Bruno de Dieuleveult
- Costumes Creator
- Pierre-Yves Gayraud
- Costumes
- Pierre Bechir
- Astrid Danielsson
- Chantal Glasman
- Khadija Zeggai
- Svetlana Poberejnaia
- Boriana Semerdjieva
- Doriana Voutchkova
- Irina Kotcheva
- Anna Katchouleva
- Make-up
- Jocelyne Lemery
- Marie-France Taulère
- Mina Matsumura
- Violetta Lazarova
- Leftera Todorova
- Atanaska Popova
- Ivanka Gorchinina
- Hairdressers
- Patrick Girault
- Agate Moro
- Pascal Ferrero
- Titles
- Marchetti
- Piano
- Emanuel Ax
- Orchestra Director
- James Shearman
- Music Performers
- Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra
- Orchestrations
- Lawrence Ashmore
- Music Producers
- Maggie Rodford
- Air Edel Associates Ltd
- Music Editor
- Roy Prendergast
- Music Recordist/Mixer
- Nick Wollage
- Soundtrack
- "V Stepi Molda Vanskoï"; "Proshchanie Slavianki"; "Smuglianka"; "Divlious ia na Niebo, Tai Doumkou Gadaiou"; "V Toumanie Skrilas Milaia Odessa"; "Maroussia Raz Dva Tri"; "Iekhav Kozak za Dunaï"; "Solovi"
- Sound
- Guillaume Sciama
- Gérard Hardy
- Dominique Dalmasso
- Olivier Burgaud
- Mixage
- Jean-Charles Martel
- Sound Editors
- Alexandre Widmer
- Marilena Cavola
- Sound Effects
- Laurent Lévy
- François LePeuple
- Foley Editor
- Alexandre Widmer
- Post-synchronization
- Jacques Lévy
- Isabelle Tat
- Françoise Maulny-Lévy
- Cast
- Sandrine Bonnaire
- Marie
- Oleg Menchikov
- Alexeï Golovin
- Sergueï Bodrov Jr
- Sacha
- Catherine Deneuve
- Gabrielle Develay
- Tatiana Doguileva
- Olga
- René Feret
- French ambassador
- Grigori Manoukov
- Pirogov
- Atanass Atanassov
- Viktor
- Bogdan Stupka
- Colonel Boïko
- Meglena Karalambova
- Nina Fiodorovna
- Valentin Ganev
- Volodia Petrov
- Ruben Tapiero
- Sérioja, aged 7
- Erwan Baynaud
- Sérioja, aged 14
- Tania Massalitinova
- Alexandrovna
- Nikolaï Binev
- Sergueï Kozlov
- Daniel Martin
- Turkish captain
- Hubert Saint Macary
- ambassador's counsel
- Jauris Casanova
- Fabiani
- Joël Chapron
- theatre actor
- François Caron
- Paris surveillance policeman
- Maria Verdi
- dresser
- Yvan Savov
- middle Petrov
- Alexandre Stoliartchouk
- younger Petrov
- Tania Lioutzkanova
- invalid's wife
- Youri Yakovlev
- old man at commune
- Malin Krastev
- drunk
- Ivan Petrov
- invalid
- Stefan Mladenov
- Evguenia Anguelova
- Mac Marinov
- children in apartment
- Viara Tabakova
- drunk's wife
- Dimitar Nikolov
- truck driver
- Alexeï Vertinski
- police 1 at arrest
- Petro Panchouk
- Father Gueorgui
- Kalin Lavorov
- Léonid Kozlov
- Mikhail Ganev
- Dimitri
- Banko Bankov
- interrogating officer
- Robin Kafaliev
- Plamen Manassiev
- wharf officers
- Maxim Guentchev
- mayor of Kiev
- Krassimir Rankov
- Androv
- Emil Marcov
- Caucasian
- Niolina BeletskaÏa
- Irina
- Igor Karalenko
- acrobat
- Oleg Lissigor
- Anatoly
- Tamara Alexandrova
- selector
- Jordan Gospodinov
- Sofia taxi driver
- Valentin Tanev
- Bulgarian police controller
- Alexandre Stoyanov
- KGB policeman
- Tsvetana Mirtcheva
- inhalations worker
- the song and dance ensemble of Ukrainian Army (artistic director:
- Vitali Kholovtchouk)
- the national swimming team of Ukraine
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Gala Film Distributors
- 11,226 feet
- 124 minutes 44 seconds
- Dolby Digital/DTS
- In Colour
- Subtitles
- French theatrical title
- Est-Ouest