East-West

French filmmakers lately have been celebrating national heroines, from Claude Berri's bio-pic of World War II Resistance warrior Lucie Aubrac to Luc Besson's epic about Joan of Arc. The heroine of Regis Wargnier's Oscar-nominated East-West is more of a composite, and the film is a melodramatic hodgepodge.

Sandrine Bonnaire is tight-lipped and long-suffering as Marie, the French wife of Alexei (Oleg Menchikov), a Russian physician who's a bit leary about leaving Paris for the Workers' Paradise when Stalin offers amnesty to all expatriates in 1946. Her misgivings prove justified; no sooner are they off the boat than she's brutally interrogated as a spy. Things improve slightly when they move into a squalid tenement filled with sluts, thieves, informers, and saintly martyrs and the seemingly perfidious Alexei toadies up to the party. Indomitable, Marie plots her escape, ludicrously with a visiting French artiste played by Catherine Deneuve in a cameo and then more touchingly with a young Soviet swimmer. After what seems a gulag sentence later, the remarkably unaged Marie seems headed for brighter prospects, but by then it's hard to care. Instead of paying tribute to human endurance, East-West tests it.

-- Peter Keough