East/West

Naïvety in the film stinks from miles away. I don't know what it was like for Oleg Menšikov to shoot this film, when he actually shoots about how his country, with its own psychology, destroys one Russian after another with the arrival of the communists. That return, that was really like a fairy tale, like Ivan went to the gulag for Nastěnka and on the way he met, greeted Stalin... and never made it there. Very harsh and uncompromising. In addition, the story is told from a period of several years, where opinions and thoughts change diversely and overall it evokes that terrible time quite nicely, which emerged in the Soviet Union after 1946. (07/07/2021)

A professionally filmed melodrama that vividly illustrates the crazy circumstances in Stalinist Russia of the 1940s and 1950s to today's audience. Sandrine Bonnaire and Oleg Menshikov rank highly on my personal actor's scale and they definitely did not disappoint me. Despite its attractive subject matter and strong story, the film has something either excessive or lacking. Despite indisputable festival ambitions, or perhaps because of them, the result feels somewhat artificial and calculated. This is a common case with international co-productions, which involve a lot of compromises. Overall impression: 65%. (10/16/2013)