Answering Stalin's deceptive invitation to help build a new USSR, the young French wife of a Russian expatriate returns to the Motherland with her husband after WWII, only to find herself trapped in a dilapidated, alien world of tenement housing, paranoid communist control and rampant suspicion. Based on real accounts of emigrant Russians tricked into coming home to misery, this personal epic of strife, despair and obstinate hope is a splendid, gripping work of cinema by Régis Wargnier (Indochine), packed frame-by-frame with crushing tension, fear and bottled-up emotion. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as the wife seeking an underground way home, with Oleg Menchikov as her guilt-ridden, sacrificial husband and Catherine Deneuve as a French activist/actress visiting Kiev who becomes her single hope for freedom. Highly recommended. (R. Blackwelder)
East-West
Columbia TriStar, 125 min., in French w/English subtitles, PG-13, VHS: $98.99, DVD: $29.95, Oct. 3 Vol. 15, Issue 5
East-West
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