Regis Wargnier Movies

French director Regis Wargnier's fifth feature film is a romantic period drama which is also a tribute to the victims of a tragic Stalinist episode. In June 1946, Stalin launched a major propaganda campaign aimed at Russians who had settled in the West, offering them amnesty and an opportunity to be involved in the postwar restructuring of the USSR. Many people who believed Stalin and returned home were executed, interned, or subjected to repression. The protagonist of Est-Ouest, Alexei Golovin (Oleg Menshikov), takes his young French wife Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and son Serioja with him on the long journey back to his native land that he has missed so much. On the board of the steamship taking them to Odessa, people like them celebrate the new life that they anticipate. However, reality strikes when they reach shore. Many people are immediately executed or sent to work camps. Alexei is spared to use his skill as an accomplished doctor. He is sent to Kiev to work in a dispensary and live in a communal apartment. Alexei accepts his fate but Marie dreams of escaping to freedom. Opportunity comes her way when she meets Gabrielle Develay (Catherine Deneuve), a famous French actress on tour, passing through Kiev. Tension mounts as the relationship of Alexei and Marie is put to test. For the script of this co-production between France and Russia, Wargnier had three other collaborators: Louis Gardel, who had previously collaborated with Wargnier on Indochine; Sergei Bodrov, a well-known Russian filmmaker best-known for his award winning S.E.R. and The Prisoner of the Mountains; and Azeri scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, best remembered for his scripts of Nikita Mikhalkov films. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, All Movie Guide

Regis Wargnier's epic about French Indochina -- from the years of French colonial imperialism to the days when American presence made itself felt and the country became known as Vietnam -- is a story of romance and separation told through the backdrop of a country in turmoil. The film centers on the relationship of the beautiful and imperious Eliane (Catherine Deneuve), a French rubber-plantation owner, and Camille (Linh Dan Pham), her adopted Indochinese daughter. The mother and daughter are very close until a diffident naval officer, Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez) enters their lives. Eliane is in love with him, but Jean-Baptiste and Camille become attracted to each other and fall in love. Thinking that she is doing Camille a favor, Eliane arranges to have Jean-Baptiste transferred to the far-away Tonkin Islands. But Camille flees the plantation to go to the man she loves. As she travels the country, she gains a greater knowledge and respect for the people of her homeland. When the government tears her from Jean-Baptiste and their infant child and arrests her for crimes against the state, she becomes politicized and becomes a supporter of the communists in the country's civil war. As the country rocks in turmoil, Eliane becomes a personification of France, coolly walking amid her peasant workers, neither bowed nor afraid, grimly looking westward. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

The personal tragedy of an alcoholic hemmed in by a domineering wife is the focus of this drama of hope lost and regained. Simon (Christophe Malavoy) is a solo violinist in an orchestra managed by his wife Laura (Jane Birkin). Haunted by specters of his own inadequacy, he loses his insecurities in drink, but that only results in rejection from his fellow musicians. They do not want him playing in the next major concert, which puts Laura in a bind. She fights for him to continue playing, not realizing that he may actually need time off. Simon begins to turn himself around when he meets a recovering alcoholic who introduces him to AA-style meetings and new friends. They understand his problem from their own perspective, yet he still has his increasingly belligerent wife and his future as a musician to handle. La Femme de ma vie was awarded Best First Film by the French Academy of Cinema. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The plot in this story weaves around like a New Year's reveler at four in the morning, heading first in one direction and then in another, with the intention of going home if things would just stop moving. Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) is a doctor whose Hippocratic oath was a hypocritic failure -- the not-so-good doctor kills his wife because she is having an affair, and he kills her lover too. Then he joins the French Foreign Legion. On his way to the former French colonies in Africa, the plane he is in crashes, and Rossi, a "friend" on the plane with some overweight in carry-on money, shoots Bernard and takes off, leaving him for dead. He is nursed back to life and health by friendly villagers and just his luck, he not only manages to make his fortune in Africa, he also nabs a French passport from a dying man who will clearly not need it anymore unless the Pearly Gates have a French guard. The doctor gets back to Paris and hunts down Rossi, who at this point does not much care what happens to him because he is a miserable cad, as opposed to the once happy cad who shot Bernard. The doctor kills Rossi, an act witnessed by Ali (Hakim Chanem) a precocious Arab teenager who sees this as his chance to blackmail the doctor into "taking care of" a rotten police inspector responsible for murdering the boy's older brother. Rossi was the cause of the dead brother's drug addiction. However, the boy's sister Zita (Souad Amidou) works as a hooker-waitress at a restaurant that serves women on the side, and she and the doctor fall in love. As might be expected, the restaurant is owned by the nefarious police inspector and it does not take long before the once-cooperative Ali turns against Bernard and writes a letter to the inspector, spilling the beans, as many and varied as these are by now. Finally, Bernard is surrounded by the police but love has changed him, and he refuses to fight. As he heads off to prison, the plot has another twist or two as it lurches toward the final credits. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

A Jewish Mafia-like family is running a prostitution ring, selling "protection," and operating gambling casinos -- more or less with impunity, and at peace with their Arab counterparts -- until a young gangster (Bernard Giraudeau) decides to pit the two ethnic factions against each other. Jewish cultural and religious events are celebrated by the Jewish gangsters, who promote family traditions -- in contrast to the police inspector who has no family and is out to do them all in. Focusing on the Jewish mob boss, the story has him undergoing some personal rehabilitation in the end. Actually, comparing the merits of ethnically and religiously different mobs of gangsters might be a little like comparing the respective beauty of a pair of week-old corpses. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide