An Oscar nominee for best foreign film, "East-West" tries to sweep the viewer away with a decades-long saga about the triumph of unfairly persecuted individuals over the outrageous inhumanity of a totalitarian regime.
Set mostly in the post-World War II Soviet Union, director/co-writer Regis Wargnier's slick, unconvincing film is certainly big enough in its serious intentions to rival his 1992 Academy Award winner "Indochine".
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire (Jacques Rivette's "Secret Defense") as young French woman Marie, who joins Russian husband Alexei (Oleg Menchikov) when Stalin offers amnesty to returning emigrants willing to help with the country's post-war reconstruction, "East-West" is respectful of history perhaps, but not of good storytelling.
The Sony Pictures Classics release, opening March 31 in New York and Los Angeles, is a French-Russian-Spanish-Bulgarian production in French and Russian with English subtitles. The film is only intermittently engaging as it blasts through a miserable tale of repression, paranoia, romantic disillusionment, desperate love, imprisonment and crowd-pleasing redemption.
When they reach the USSR in the opening moments of the film, hopeful Marie, Alexei and their son Serioja are luckily not killed outright, like many others. A doctor who is useful for propaganda purposes -- if not his skills -- shocked Alexei has no choice but to go to Kiev with his family and live in a rat fink-infested apartment building, where Marie's French-speaking ways and open dissatisfaction are stifled for survival purposes.
Screenwriters Roustam Ibraguimbek, Serguei Bodrov, Louis Gardel and Wargnier have no trouble making Marie a sympathetic victim, but they only go for sketchy supporting characters, including all the mean and nasty Soviets.
Meanwhile, Alexei starts to get comfortable and the two speedily "grow apart" after Marie, knowing she's trapped, takes huge risks to contact a touring French actress (Catherine Deneuve) about her miserable fate.
But getting west of the east is no easy thing, and life goes on. Alexei sleeps with a neighbor (Tatiana Doguileva) and amply disappointed-in-her-man Marie starts hanging around moody Sacha (Serguei Bodrov Jr.), a promising teenage swimmer with an unenthusiastic attitude since his grandmother was taken away and never returned.
Sacha wins a big race and they fall in love, but when he later escapes the country, always-suspected foreigner Marie takes the fall. Sent to the gulag -- even crafty, play-by-the-rules Alexei can't save her -- Marie lasts years, long enough for Stalin to die and Alexei to make elaborate plans to get her out.
Even at a wearying two hours, the scenario makes significant leaps in time and feels chopped up.
Menchikov ("The Barber of Siberia") once again proves to be a reliable talent in a sub par project, while Bonnaire stays afloat in Wargnier's melodramatic, simplistically political potboiler, filmed gloomily in Bulgaria and the Ukraine.
EAST-WEST
Sony Pictures Classics
UGC YM, France 3 Cinema
NTV Profit/Mate Prods./Gala Films
Director:Regis Wargnier
Screenwriters:Roustam Ibraguimbek, Serguei Bodrov, Louis Gardel, Regis Wargnier
Producer:Yves Marmion
Director of photography:Laurent Dailland
Production designers:Vladimir Svetozarov, Alexei Levtchenko
Editor:Herve Schneid
Costume designer:Pierre-Yves Gayraud
Music:Patrick Doyle
Casting:Gerard Moulevrier
Color/stereo
Cast:
Marie:Sandrine Bonnaire
Alexei:Oleg Menchikov
Gabrielle:Catherine Deneuve
Sacha:Serguei Bodrov Jr.
Olga:Tatiana Doguileva
Running time -- 121 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
Set mostly in the post-World War II Soviet Union, director/co-writer Regis Wargnier's slick, unconvincing film is certainly big enough in its serious intentions to rival his 1992 Academy Award winner "Indochine".
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire (Jacques Rivette's "Secret Defense") as young French woman Marie, who joins Russian husband Alexei (Oleg Menchikov) when Stalin offers amnesty to returning emigrants willing to help with the country's post-war reconstruction, "East-West" is respectful of history perhaps, but not of good storytelling.
The Sony Pictures Classics release, opening March 31 in New York and Los Angeles, is a French-Russian-Spanish-Bulgarian production in French and Russian with English subtitles. The film is only intermittently engaging as it blasts through a miserable tale of repression, paranoia, romantic disillusionment, desperate love, imprisonment and crowd-pleasing redemption.
When they reach the USSR in the opening moments of the film, hopeful Marie, Alexei and their son Serioja are luckily not killed outright, like many others. A doctor who is useful for propaganda purposes -- if not his skills -- shocked Alexei has no choice but to go to Kiev with his family and live in a rat fink-infested apartment building, where Marie's French-speaking ways and open dissatisfaction are stifled for survival purposes.
Screenwriters Roustam Ibraguimbek, Serguei Bodrov, Louis Gardel and Wargnier have no trouble making Marie a sympathetic victim, but they only go for sketchy supporting characters, including all the mean and nasty Soviets.
Meanwhile, Alexei starts to get comfortable and the two speedily "grow apart" after Marie, knowing she's trapped, takes huge risks to contact a touring French actress (Catherine Deneuve) about her miserable fate.
But getting west of the east is no easy thing, and life goes on. Alexei sleeps with a neighbor (Tatiana Doguileva) and amply disappointed-in-her-man Marie starts hanging around moody Sacha (Serguei Bodrov Jr.), a promising teenage swimmer with an unenthusiastic attitude since his grandmother was taken away and never returned.
Sacha wins a big race and they fall in love, but when he later escapes the country, always-suspected foreigner Marie takes the fall. Sent to the gulag -- even crafty, play-by-the-rules Alexei can't save her -- Marie lasts years, long enough for Stalin to die and Alexei to make elaborate plans to get her out.
Even at a wearying two hours, the scenario makes significant leaps in time and feels chopped up.
Menchikov ("The Barber of Siberia") once again proves to be a reliable talent in a sub par project, while Bonnaire stays afloat in Wargnier's melodramatic, simplistically political potboiler, filmed gloomily in Bulgaria and the Ukraine.
EAST-WEST
Sony Pictures Classics
UGC YM, France 3 Cinema
NTV Profit/Mate Prods./Gala Films
Director:Regis Wargnier
Screenwriters:Roustam Ibraguimbek, Serguei Bodrov, Louis Gardel, Regis Wargnier
Producer:Yves Marmion
Director of photography:Laurent Dailland
Production designers:Vladimir Svetozarov, Alexei Levtchenko
Editor:Herve Schneid
Costume designer:Pierre-Yves Gayraud
Music:Patrick Doyle
Casting:Gerard Moulevrier
Color/stereo
Cast:
Marie:Sandrine Bonnaire
Alexei:Oleg Menchikov
Gabrielle:Catherine Deneuve
Sacha:Serguei Bodrov Jr.
Olga:Tatiana Doguileva
Running time -- 121 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
With ''Indochine, '' French filmmakers have produced the closest thing to a grand, overseas melodrama since Hollywood's olden days.
Exotic locales (shot on location in Vietnam), torrid interracial romance, native revolutionaries, corrupt colonialists, teeming masses, cynical police -- they're all here, along with a hefty star performance from an apparently ageless Catherine Deneuve.
For all of that, plus luxurious production values, the film is sometimes cold and distant, and U.S. audiences may find it difficult to lose themselves in the two-track story.
However, although it is definitely a select-site performer, it could well rope in a crossover audience and find itself profiting in a big way from long-term engagements.
Deneuve is Eliane, an Indochina-born French woman, contemptuous of local French colonial society, who spends as much time as possible working her rubber plantation.
Aside from her father, her main companion is her ward Camille Linh Dan Pham), the orphaned 16-year-old daughter of Annamese royalty whom Eliane has raised since childhood.
A rift appears when each woman independently meets and falls for a dashing French naval officer, Jean-Baptiste Le Guen (Vincent Perez), who's undergoing a kind of existential crisis of his own over his troubled posting.
When Eliane discovers that Camille is seeing Jean-Baptiste, she is furious, not out of jealousy, but because she fears for her ward's status should she not go through with her long-arranged marriage for the sake of a temporarily assigned officer.
Eliane has Jean-Baptiste posted to the far-off Tonkin islands and Camille, mistaking Eliane's motives, runs away to find him.
Camille's search is the beginning of a long journey through her native land that culminates with her arrival at a slave market near Jean-Baptiste's outpost.
Aroused by traders' brutality, Camille commits murder, Jean-Baptiste saves her, and soon the two are fugitives in the Indochinese wilderness, hiding out with communists and dodging French colonial police.
For most of this Deneuve is restricted to discomfiting polite society, working her peasant laborers and conferring with the Saigon police chief, Guy Asselin (Jean Yanne).
Asselin, Eliane's best friend, is a dutiful cynic and it is he who plots to bring Camille and Jean-Baptiste in -- but alive.
Although the two plot strands disconnect at times, the film finally resolves itself as the story of Eliane's loss of Camille and, hence, in part, of her country.
Deneuve's star power helps put this somewhat solipsistic twist over convincingly, however.
The power of the location lensing is sometimes overwhelming, from the forbidding Tonkin islands to the quiet royal dignity of Hue.
Newcomer Linh Dan Pham is attractive and essentially believable, if not completely eloquent, Perez adequately romantic and Yanne, seizing an actor's main chance, a delightful sinner.
INDOCHINE
Sony Pictures Classics
Paradis Films et la Generale Di'Images, Bac Films, Orly Films, Cine Cinq
Director Regis Wargnier
Producer Eric Heumann
Screenplay Erik Orsenna, Louis Gardel, Catherine Cohen, Regis Wargnier
Director of photography Francois Catonne, A.F.C.
Composer Patrick Doyle
Design director Jacques Bunoir
Casting Pierre Amzallag
Color/Dolby
Eliane Catherine Deneuve
Camille Linh Dan Pham
Jean-Baptiste Vincent Perez
Guy Jean Yanne
Running time -- 155 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
Exotic locales (shot on location in Vietnam), torrid interracial romance, native revolutionaries, corrupt colonialists, teeming masses, cynical police -- they're all here, along with a hefty star performance from an apparently ageless Catherine Deneuve.
For all of that, plus luxurious production values, the film is sometimes cold and distant, and U.S. audiences may find it difficult to lose themselves in the two-track story.
However, although it is definitely a select-site performer, it could well rope in a crossover audience and find itself profiting in a big way from long-term engagements.
Deneuve is Eliane, an Indochina-born French woman, contemptuous of local French colonial society, who spends as much time as possible working her rubber plantation.
Aside from her father, her main companion is her ward Camille Linh Dan Pham), the orphaned 16-year-old daughter of Annamese royalty whom Eliane has raised since childhood.
A rift appears when each woman independently meets and falls for a dashing French naval officer, Jean-Baptiste Le Guen (Vincent Perez), who's undergoing a kind of existential crisis of his own over his troubled posting.
When Eliane discovers that Camille is seeing Jean-Baptiste, she is furious, not out of jealousy, but because she fears for her ward's status should she not go through with her long-arranged marriage for the sake of a temporarily assigned officer.
Eliane has Jean-Baptiste posted to the far-off Tonkin islands and Camille, mistaking Eliane's motives, runs away to find him.
Camille's search is the beginning of a long journey through her native land that culminates with her arrival at a slave market near Jean-Baptiste's outpost.
Aroused by traders' brutality, Camille commits murder, Jean-Baptiste saves her, and soon the two are fugitives in the Indochinese wilderness, hiding out with communists and dodging French colonial police.
For most of this Deneuve is restricted to discomfiting polite society, working her peasant laborers and conferring with the Saigon police chief, Guy Asselin (Jean Yanne).
Asselin, Eliane's best friend, is a dutiful cynic and it is he who plots to bring Camille and Jean-Baptiste in -- but alive.
Although the two plot strands disconnect at times, the film finally resolves itself as the story of Eliane's loss of Camille and, hence, in part, of her country.
Deneuve's star power helps put this somewhat solipsistic twist over convincingly, however.
The power of the location lensing is sometimes overwhelming, from the forbidding Tonkin islands to the quiet royal dignity of Hue.
Newcomer Linh Dan Pham is attractive and essentially believable, if not completely eloquent, Perez adequately romantic and Yanne, seizing an actor's main chance, a delightful sinner.
INDOCHINE
Sony Pictures Classics
Paradis Films et la Generale Di'Images, Bac Films, Orly Films, Cine Cinq
Director Regis Wargnier
Producer Eric Heumann
Screenplay Erik Orsenna, Louis Gardel, Catherine Cohen, Regis Wargnier
Director of photography Francois Catonne, A.F.C.
Composer Patrick Doyle
Design director Jacques Bunoir
Casting Pierre Amzallag
Color/Dolby
Eliane Catherine Deneuve
Camille Linh Dan Pham
Jean-Baptiste Vincent Perez
Guy Jean Yanne
Running time -- 155 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
- 12/23/1992
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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