East-West

(Columbia TriStar)

Sandrine Bonnaire is tight-lipped and long-suffering as Marie, the French wife of Alexei (Oleg Menchikov), a Russian physician who leaves Paris for the Workers' Paradise when Stalin offers amnesty to all expatriates in 1946. No sooner are they off the boat than she's brutally interrogated as a spy. 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, Regis Wargnier's Oscar-nominated film tests it.