True tales inspired Oscar-nominated `East-West'

Almost none of this year's Oscar-nominated French film, "East-West," was shot in France.

Two of its stars, Oleg Menchikov and Sergei Bodrov Jr., are Russians who were given line-by-line readings to get by with their French dialogue. They previously starred in an Oscar-nominated 1996 Russian film, "Prisoner of the Mountains," which was directed by Bodrov's father, who now lives in Venice Beach, Calif. Sergei Bodrov Sr. also gets a credit as co-writer of "East-West."

However, the movie does feature a couple of French stars, Catherine Deneuve and Sandrine Bonnaire, and it was directed by Regis Wargnier, who won an Oscar for his last collaboration with Deneuve, "Indochine." "East-West" opens here Friday.

Presented as the true story of a Russian doctor (Menchikov) and his French wife (Bonnaire), who naively relocate to a brutal Soviet Union after World War II, "East-West" is based on the true stories of thousands of families who found themselves regretting their decision to move to Russia.

"It's a composite of a lot of stuff," said Wargnier, who visited Seattle two days after losing the Oscar to Spain's "All About My Mother." "It's based on talks I had with a lot of people."

While he was working with Deneuve on an "Asian Western" set in the 1990s, Wargnier scouted Russian locations and kept running into Russians who could speak French. They had been raised in France, then moved to Russia with their parents, who found themselves trapped in a totalitarian nightmare.

"I heard one, two, three stories like this and I was amazed," said Wargnier. "The lucky ones, the ones who weren't arrested or sent away, had so many memories of those times."

Eventually his "Asian Western" turned out to be too ambitious and expensive. He also found himself more captivated by emigrants living under Stalin.

He even managed to find a key supporting role for Deneuve, as an influential touring actress who tries to help the victimized family. Her character is partly based on the late Simone Signoret, who regretted that she didn't do more to help a Czech relative who was threatened during the Soviet invasion.

"We had this base, which is very precise, of all these stories from people I'd met," Wargnier said. "Some of it was really emotional material."

Bodrov Sr. brought his own memories of the period to the script. He had once been forced to live in the same room with gangsters who surprised him with their gentleness. They would never rob their fellow apartment dwellers.

The elder Bodrov also suggested that his son, who has become a matinee idol in Russia, could play the role of a teenage Russian swimmer who falls in love with Bonnaire's character. Much of the film deals with their attempts to escape.

"Bodrov Jr. was supposed to work on a sequel to `Brother,' which is a huge cult movie in Russia," said Wargnier. But the money fell through when Russia went through a financial crisis, and the actor was free to do "East-West." Although he's not a swimmer, he prepared for the role by working out on weight machines and swimming at a Moscow gym.

In the movie, Bodrov's character literally swims for freedom, braving icy waters and swimming for hours to meet up with a friendly non-Russian ship. The incident is based on stories of people who tried to escape the Soviet Union by swimming along the Georgian coast. Many drowned.

"Meeting up with a ship is our creation," said Wargnier. "But you don't know what people have done to escape."

However, he wasn't particularly put off by the difficulties of shooting the sequence. To make it believable that the swimmer could avoid authorities, the episode was shot entirely in the early morning hours and after sunset.

"I like to swim, to be in the water, so that part wasn't difficult," he said. "Physically, it was much harder to do the scenes in the snow, when the temperature was 15 below, and Sandrine simply couldn't act. She was just frozen."

In the end, Wargnier found the tensions on the set harder to deal with than any physical challenges. Local film crews were not at ease when he was shooting in the Ukraine, where the swimming-pool scenes were shot in a rusty old pool that once belonged to the Ukrainian Army.

"Ten years ago, we (Westerners) were still the enemy," he said. "That's inside them, and they keep their distance." Hiring a translator to communicate with the crew only emphasized the language barrier.

Yet he claims that Russian audiences applaud the film because it's one of the few movies to reflect what daily life was like under Stalin.

"We should know how they were living, and how few chances they had to escape," he said. A leftist who grew up in a conservative family, he insists he does not "presume to denounce the dark years of Communism."

He tried to emphasize that many people survived the ordeal, that many kept their humanity despite making compromises. He also tried not to turn "East-West" into a political lecture.

Still, he admits, the movie "can't help coming off as anti-Communist, just by showing how privacy and love were destroyed by the system."