A year after World War II comrade Stalin invites all emigrés back to help rebuild the glorious homeland. On a returning ship a Russian doctor Alexei (Oleg Menshikov) proposes a toast to the future via his brave and beautiful French wife, Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire), who has agreed to accompany him back home. With them is their small son. It is a ship of fools indeed, and one cannot help getting that icy feeling in one’s guts for both the characters and oneself. That is, we know what awaits them; do we really want to sit through a film with such a depressing start? Well, yes, because it sweeps us along with all the force of historical inevitability instead of the usual romantic twaddle.
On their arrival in Odessa the returnees quickly learn just how true to his word Stalin can be, but the doctor and his family are spared because Alexei has his uses and they are posted off to Kiev. What follows is how they deal with day-to-day life back in the USSR while planning to get back to France via a left-wing actress (Catherine Deneuve) sympathetic to their cause.
The metaphor of swimming as a quest for freedom is beautifully woven into the story. But it’s in the treatment of ordinary life that the film triumphs. Director Regis Wargnier manages to seamlessly combine the banal, from life on the commune to the backstage flirtations of a propaganda opera where Marie works as a fitter, with a steady build-up to a tense, thriller-type resolution. There are no grand for-or-against statements, just the logical outflow of that 20th-century thing TS Eliot said mankind cannot bear too much of: reality.
Most satisfying in this near-perfect marriage of documentary representation and cathartic drama is Menshikov’s performance as a reluctant and therefore two-faced party member. He effectively manages to portray the official ice and personal fire that seems to inform the Russian character.
Filmed, directed and acted with admirable restraint, East-West was deservedly nominated for (and should have won) the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.