Baited Trap
FILM: East-West
DIRECTOR: Regis Wargnier
STARRING: Oleg Menchikov, Sandrine Bonnaire
GRADE: B
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MARIE (SANDRINE BONNAIRE) AND ALEXEI (OLEG MENCHIKOV) REGRET ACCEPTING STALIN'S OFFER TO RETURN TO RUSSIA IN EAST-WEST.
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At the end of World War II, Josef Stalin invited exiled Russians to return to
the Soviet Union to help rebuild a nation devastated by Nazi violence and the
Soviets' own scorched-earth battle strategy. Why Stalin beckoned people to come
home remains unclear, because he sent the majority of them to labor camps and
subjected the rest to countless indignities. Based upon composite stories of
real repatriates, Regis Wargnier's East-West is the story of one family
who returned.
Alexei Golovine (Oleg Menchikov) has lived most of his life in
France, where his white Russian family fled after the victory of the Red Army.
Alexei is married to a beautiful French woman, Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and
they have a 7-year-old son, Serijoa (Ruben Tapiero, later Erwan Baynaud as a
teenager). Alexei is a doctor and an idealist. He responds to Stalin's
invitation because he sees an opportunity to do good in the world. But a grim
fate awaits his family upon their arrival in Odessa. The KGB interrogates Marie
viciously and accuses her of arriving to spy. Once authorities have completed
their cruel act of intimidation, the family is sent to Kiev to be housed in a
single room in a communal apartment with five other families.
In the years to come, they have to endure an almost complete loss
of privacy as well as economic deprivation and the omnipresent threat of
capricious punishment. Alexei adjusts to these degrading circumstances with a
coolness that Marie cannot understand and ultimately cannot tolerate. She vows
that she will find a way to escape back to freedom, but Alexei counsels her to
make accommodations in a way she finds infuriating. Eventually, then, though
Alexei always protests his love for Marie, they drift apart, Alexei into a
relationship of convenience with the slutty manager of their communal
residence, and Marie into an April-July liaison with 17-year-old Sacha
Vassiliev (Serguei Bodrov Jr.), an embittered but handsome and determined
youngster who shares Marie's lust for freedom. Eventually, when French actress
Gabrielle Develay (the great Catherine Deneuve, who inhabits this role with
all the appropriate majesty just by showing up and speaking her lines)
brings a theatrical troupe to Kiev, Marie elicits the performer's assistance
and gets sent to a labor camp instead.
East-West is memorably acted by all involved. As we move
from the tumult and dislocation of the Yeltsin years into the opaqueness of the
Putin era, it's a timely reminder of what life was like during the long
darkness behind the Iron Curtain. Though white Europeans and North Americans
seem to have escaped from such tyranny now, state dictatorship continues to
flourish in China and North Korea while the cult of personality reigns in Cuba
and across Africa. Dark-skinned people around the globe continue to face the
brutality endured by the white-faced people in this film, and the picture
serves as a plea that we not forget them. Moreover, this film is a subtle
inquiry into the strategy of protest. If successful, dissidence in the name of
freedom is no less heroic for being waged quietly and from the inside.
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