La vida prometida (Este-Oeste)

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%. (16.10.2013)

East/West is drenched in naivety, and you can sense it from a mile away. I can only imagine how Oleg Menshikov felt making a film that essentially critiques how his own country, under the psychology of communism, systematically destroyed one Russian life after another. The story feels like a twisted fairy tale — like Ivan heading to the gulag to save Nastya, casually greeting Stalin along the way... and never making it there. It’s brutal and unflinching. Spanning several years, the film captures shifting perspectives and ideas, effectively evoking the grim reality of the post-1946 Soviet Union. (07.07.2021)