FilmBlather.com

East-West is one of those deadly serious movies with a convoluted plot and a lengthy running time but no interesting characters. It's an epic so oppressively tragic, so self-consciously sweeping that it made me want to puke. The story is potentially interesting and the acting is far from inept but writers Sergei Bordov and Louis Gardel simply refuse to move the story along. The movie likes to show us nothing happening.

In 1946, we are told, Joseph Stalin invited Russian emigrants exiled earlier in the century to return home. He claims that everyone will be welcomed. Instead, he kills them all when they arrive. One family, Alexei (Oleg Menshikov), Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and little Seryozha, is spared because of Alexei's background as a skilled doctor. Still, their life is nothing like it was in France, where Alexei met Marie. Marie has never been to Russia and is dissatisfied with the no-frills lifestyle. Nor is she comfortable with always having to look over your shoulder for some party member who may interpert any action as unpatriotic. In other words, she wants out, but finds leaving impossible.

As Alexei tries harder and harder to fit in and Marie tries to get out, a rift forms between the couple. Marie develops a relationship with Sascha, a young man living in the same communal apartment. His babushka (Russian for "grandmother") has just died and in his grief, he gets himself kicked off the swim team. In a strange mentor-lover relationship, Marie takes it upon herself to train Sascha by making him swim against the current in a cold lake so that he can get back on the team.

About halfway through, Catherine Deneuve shows up (why she took the role I'll never know) as an actress with enough connections in France to possibly get Marie back to her motherland. This is a giant plot contrivance: why would an actress risk her whole career to help someone she barely even knows? The movie chooses to simply ignore this question, expecting us not to question it. But in a movie that takes itself so seriously, it's unfair to ask us to accept something so farfetched.

Another slap in the face comes when we find that at least two characters' fates may rest on a big swimming contest, involving a close race, a menacing rival opponent and forced triumph when Sascha the underdog wins the race by a nose thanks to Marie's great training. I'm not sure why a writer of such a no-nonsense story would resort to such a frivolous and formulaic plot device. And then, of course, Sascha has to swim for his life later in the film. Boy, swimming against the current for a few weeks with his lover by his side sure did come in handy...

And if only it was just the contrivances. The real problem is that the plot is stagnant. It doesn't move. Only a few real "events" take place during the film's lengthy 2 hour running time (well, it seemed lengthy); the rest of the film is uninvolving detail.

All of this, still, would be sufferable if only the characters were at least mildly interesting. Alas, they are completely one-dimensional, existing solely to follow the demands of the plot. The actors definitely know what they are doing and they try their best to breathe life into their dull roles but they can't rescue the script. I simply had no desire to spend two hours with these people.

For all of my incessant whining, it's hard not to praise director Regis Wargnier for trying to tell such an epic story on a small budget and in a non-mainstream manner. Wargnier is an experienced director and I'm sure he knows the golden rule for failure: if at first you don't succeed, forget that you tried and do something else.