Catherine Deneuve in East West

Sometimes, a person can have perfect physique yet is not beautiful. "East West" seems to be such a person.

It has a good story, played by some good actors and actresses, against that unforgettable background of time and space: the years when the East and the West were separated by the Cold War. The actors all seem fit for their roles, and there were some moving scenes all through the movie: a Russian doctor and his beautiful French wife, of poetic nature, enclaved in the iron and steel of the Russian Communist rule.

Yet the movie in its entirety failed to move me. Maybe there is too much stereotyped portrayal of the government control? Frequent reference to the perfect "West"? Why was I not destroyed to pieces when he told her that he had been planning her escape for ten years, and her eyes turned all red? Wasn't I supposed to release my tear gas and cry my eyes out for them?

And Sacha's longing for the West was not justified by his dream of "freedom".

Maybe because the situation is no longer true. The Iron Curtain no longer exists and people can come and go as they please. That probably slighted the tragic nature of the story.

But I have to be honest with my own feelings. How would I have done differently had I been the director, I don't know. The portrayal of all the Russian officials is too superficial and satiracal. The movie would have suppassed the Cold War "propoganda" movies had it simply put the politics in the background, and focus on the daily struggle of the "little" people.

And Catherine Deneuve! How could you disappoint me like that! It's not that she's put on so much weight and has absolutely no figure to speak of. Throughout the whole movie she wore heavy makeup (OK Ok, she just got off stage), with no expression, no passion. So she is just this big-shot actress who liked to show off her status and to challenge the public by travelling to the Red Soviet Union, made a casual promise to save the poor little Frenchy and actually acted on her promise by using her obscure "friendship" with the ambassador. That somehow also slighted the tragic nature of the fate of the Russian-French family.

I should not waste my time writing more about a movie I did not like; there are too many good ones to watch and to write about. But this serves as a warning: minimize the politics, concentrate on the artistic side of the story if writing things with a Cold War background. :)))

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Amazon.co.uk Review

East West is, fortunately, more than the colour-by-numbers melodrama that the packaging makes it seem. On the cover, a pair of haunted eyes gaze into the middle distance above a superb example of that absurd movie poster copywriting that reads much the same wherever you put the nouns: "In a land without freedom, escape was her only hope", which is hardly more meaningful than, say, "In a land without hope, freedom was her only escape". East West deserves better.

A French-Russian production, the film tells the story of a Russian doctor, his French wife and their child. In 1946 they accept Stalin's invitation to exiled Russians to return to the motherland and help rebuild the country; swiftly they discover that the reality doesn't quite match the advertising. The film follows the stresses the situation places on the central couple's marriage and focuses on the wife's dreams of escape, which revolve around an intervention by a grand dame of French theatre (played, appropriately, by Catherine Deneuve). East West suffers slightly from several disorientating lurches forward in time, but is otherwise a superior thriller and a convincing period piece.