FRENCH DIRECTOR Regis Wargnier was in attendance when fellow nominee Pedro Almodovar won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for All about My Mother. While disappointed, Wargnier -- who nabbed the foreign film Oscar in 1993 for Indochine -- wasn't all that surprised to lose. Well before the naming of the winner, it was clear that everything was in place for the talented, mop-headed director of vibrant Spanish melodrama. It was Almodovar's turn. For most folks watching the awards show that night, the competing nomination of Wargnier's East-West barely registered a blip on the cinematic radar. I only noticed because I'd seen an advance screening; as of Oscar night, the film hadn't yet been released in America.

But despite having been passed over for an Oscar a few weeks back, Wargnier is extremely excited about his film's impending stateside release. Sitting over coffee and tea in the posh lobby of downtown Seattle's Four Seasons Hotel, Wargnier and I discuss the narrative intricacies of East-West. His English is very good, and there appears to be no limit to his willingness to extol the movie's political and emotional resonance.

After a solid half-hour of philosophizing, the director points me to a single line from the final paragraph of his director's note. It's a heady, romantic sentence which Wargnier feels gives the best summation of what the film is truly about: "East-West is the movement, the breath of life, from one person to another, from one thought to another, from one country to another." Dramatic tension is created when this human "movement" encounters some manner of inhumane resistance. In East-West, the resistance takes the form of a massive political con.

During the post-WWII reconstruction of the Soviet Union, Stalin lured Russian emigrants back with a propaganda campaign that promised, among other things, universal amnesty. Many took the bait. Those who weren't executed upon arrival found themselves trapped in a totalitarian maze of forced austerity, paranoia, and surveillance.

Like the grand novels of Dostoyevsky, Wargnier's version of the story is at once epic and episodic. The vast political backdrop is matched by an intense, intimate examination of the insidious manner in which love and loyalty can be torn apart by outer forces. Oleg Menchikov and Sandrine Bonnaire play Alexei and Marie, a couple whose marriage collapses under the weight of the political oppression they encounter in Odessa. While both are appalled by the conditions, only Marie, who is French, seems to recognize the need to flee immediately. Alexei is cautious to the point of impenetrability. The conflict drives both of them to infidelities, Marie with an Olympic-trained swimmer, Alexei with a quintessential Soviet mistress: a landlady named Olga. But in the tumult of the oppressive social reality, these seeming betrayals play out paradoxically as the ultimate gesture of love.

For all its psychological complexity, though, East-West is a straightforward tale, propelled relentlessly forward by the tragic truths of history. A fatal story in every sense of the word, the film is also an unabashed tearjerker, as shamelessly romantic as Casablanca. The tension works. With a tight, precariously sympathetic focus on the daily trials of very different -- and yet irrevocably connected -- individuals, Wargnier reveals the hope underlying the seemingly hopeless actions of people struggling toward freedom.

"It's life," Wargnier responds when I ask him to address the extreme conflict between the political and personal elements of East-West. "People aren't very conscious that politics are leading their lives. To see that clearly, you need time. That's what is epic."

I ask him which is more important, freedom or love?

"I think to me," he says, frowning, "freedom comes first." He pauses, looking at the ceiling. "It's too big, and maybe not enough. You have to add the word independence. Independence is the most beautiful gift you can give to someone. To make them free."

The director admits that the film creates an overwhelming aura of helplessness through its representation of collective paranoia and political terror. "It's dark," he says. "I couldn't escape that."

But Wargnier, a Frenchman, is indelibly romantic. "In this story," he says with a grin, "love saves two people. This is very positive." Love's strange convolutions generate hope for the film's embattled characters, a testament to the director's regard for the power of the individual, even in a context as hopeless as Stalin's U.S.S.R.

"You have to create hope," Wargnier says.