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Grade: B-

Verdict: An uneven Iron Curtain epic.

Details: Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Oleg Menchikov and Catherine Deneuve. Rated PG-13 for violence and brief sensuality. In French and Russian with subtitles. 2 hours, 1 minute.

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Review: It's not the welcome home they expect. When Russian emigres return to Russia after World War II, invited warmly by Josef Stalin himself, they're met in their former motherland by soldiers with guns. Some of them are shot on sight. Some are sent to labor camps.

By comparison, Alexei (Oleg Menchikov) and his French wife, Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire), look lucky. At the start of "East-West," they're spared Stalin's wrath, primarily because Alexei is a doctor. He's young and useful. So, with their young son, they're sent to Kiev, where they're assigned a single-room apartment in an overcrowded boardinghouse. It's a nest of paranoia where tenants are ready to denounce each other to the police as a show of their patriotism.

Finding herself trapped in an open-eyed nightmare, Marie desperately tries to find ways to regain her liberty and return to France. Every move she makes is monitored and reflects badly on Alexei, who, to her growing horror, seems to be trying to be a model citizen and move upward in the Soviet hierarchy.

Their marriage becomes what appears to be an act of mutual betrayal, as each tries to survive Stalin's brutal regime in ways that undermine their trust in each other. The breach between them widens when two very different people enter Marie's life.

The first is Gabrielle (Catherine Deneuve), the grand French actress whose theater company tours through Kiev, and whom Marie sees as a possible liaison between herself and the French government. The second is Sacha (Serguei Bodrov Jr.), a 17-year-old swimmer who, like Marie, would like to escape Russia. She becomes his unofficial coach, training him to swim hard, with the hopes of winning a slot at the European championships in Vienna, where he could seek political asylum.

Director Regis Wargnier builds an oppressively claustrophobic atmosphere and constructs several suspenseful sequences. But, like his Oscar-winning "Indochine," this movie feels both overblown and undernourished. It takes a fascinating bit of history, then plies it with melodrama, and the movie seems conflicted between epic storytelling and intimate drama. After a compelling first half, "East-West" begins to feel dramatically haphazard; it jumps forward in time, and its tightly coiled energy starts to dissipate.

It's mainly held together by Bonnaire, whose face is something of a cinematic wonder--at one moment lush and glamorous, the next hard and haggard. She gets strong help from Menchikov as a man more complicated than she thinks, and, of course, Deneuve is divine sweeping in as a grande dame. The only disappointment in the cast is Bodrov, with his blank, slightly dumb face. For the record, his father, Serguei Bodrov Sr. ("Prisoner of the Mountains"), was one of the screenwriters.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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