... Aleksei Uchitel's His Wife's Diary is a film about the Nobel-Prize winning writer Ivan Bunin, starring Andrei Smirnov and Galina Tiunina. Although the film captures the spectator with its plot and the acting, the script calls for criticism in that it elevates Bunin's wife to heroic status, implying she sacrificed her life for Bunin. Also problematic is the fact that the picture was filmed on the Black Sea, not in southern France (for financial reasons). But here, no filmmaker, however talented, can betray. The ill-chosen location spoils the first hour or so, when the spectator tries to figure out when the film is set, why Bunin is in Yalta (rather than Grasse), and indeed why Grasse should be located on the seaside...

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