East/West

In 1946, Stalin calls all White Russian émigrés who fled to the West after the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, back to the USSR in order to help rebuild the devastated motherland in the aftermath of the Second World War and offers them citizenship. Among a group of French émigrés is the doctor Alexei Golovin (Menshikov), who believes in Stalin's promises of a peaceful new beginning, his French wife Marie (Bonnaire), and their young son Serjoscha. The atmosphere on the ship taking them to Russia is jovial, with drinking and singing. But as soon as they dock in Odessa, it is clear that Stalin was using his promises as an excuse to murder the exiles or have them put in Gulags. Once ashore, the Soviet authorities separate them into two groups, 'fit' and 'unfit'. A young man is shot trying to run back to his father from whom he is separated, and the Golovins begin to understand the situation they have landed in.

On arrival Marie is branded a spy by a Soviet official, and her French passport is torn up. The family moves into a cramped apartment in a communal house in Kyiv and Alexei accepts a job overseeing workers' health in a factory. Marie briefly befriends the elderly housekeeper — who speaks some French—but this lady is quickly 'denounced', taken away, and ends up dead. Her grandson Sasha (Bodrov) is left without a home when a couple arrive and claim his grandmother's room. Marie invites him to live in the Golovin's room.

Marie feels stifled and repressed and wants to go back to France. She attempts to go to the Soviet authorities and ask to be sent back, but she is stopped by Alexei. Public non-compliance, he knows, could get them all killed. She also approaches a visiting French actress, Gabrielle (Deneuve), and attempts to gain her help in escaping the USSR. Marie and Alexei grow distant as he assumes his role as the public health advisor and publicly toes the party line, while she yearns for France. Her budding friendship with Sasha, who is a champion swimmer recently thrown out of the local team, becomes a vehicle of possible escape. As she helps him train in order to regain his position on the team, they see an opportunity to go West for the European championships, and help them both towards liberation. Marie gains a job working to iron costumes for the military choir in Kyiv.

Maria and Alexei fall out after he publicly thanks the Soviet government and she is furious. Alexei then reveals that he has slept with a neighbor, Olga, because Marie has become distant and the other woman 'looks at him differently' than the resentment he constantly gets from Marie. She throws him out and he begins to live in the neighboring room with Olga.

Sasha wins the trials and is selected for the championships in Vienna. After the selection, he spends the night with Marie. Soon after, Marie's letters to her French family are discovered in his bags and his coach warns her to stay away. Sasha goes to a training camp by the Black Sea.

While away for training, Sasha arranges for himself to be smuggled on a ship out of the USSR and needs money to pay for it. Marie obtains the money and comes to the port city with the military choir. The ship captain at first tries to go back on the agreement, but then explains that he can't come close to shore, so Sasha attempts to swim six hours out to meet him far offshore. Marie is brutally interrogated by the same KGB official she first met when she came to the USSR. A French magazine article reveals that Sasha was successful in escaping to the West, Marie is implicated and jailed for six years.

Upon her release, her now teenage son and husband come to receive her. She reconciles with Alexei, and he promises her he still loves her. Two years later they are in a delegation to Sofia, Bulgaria where Alexei reveals to Marie that he has arranged for her escape over the intervening years by writing to the actress Gabrielle. Marie and her son escape with Gabrielle to the French embassy. Alexei is arrested for complicity and sent to be a medic in a gulag in Sakhalin. With the advent of glasnost in the Soviet Union he finally returns to France in 1987.

• Sandrine Bonnaire as Marie Golovina
• Oleg Menshikov as Alexey Golovin
• Catherine Deneuve as Gabrielle Devele
• Sergei Bodrov Jr. as Sasha Vasilyev
• Grigori Manoukov as Pirogov
• Tatyana Dogileva as Olga
• Bohdan Stupka as Colonel Boyko
• Hubert Saint-Macary as embassy advisor
• Atanass Atanassov as Viktor
• Valentin Ganev as Volodya Petrov

• List of submissions to the 72nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of French submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

• East/West at IMDb
• East/West at AllMovie
• East/West at Box Office Mojo
• East/West at Rotten Tomatoes