Guillaume Canet & Emir Kusturica in the movie Farewell

A puffed-up spy thriller such as "Salt" prods a moviegoer into one of two reactions:

1. It's nonsense, but I enjoy it.

2. It's nonsense. Next film, please.

Either way, I have a strong recommendation for that next film -- an ideal corrective to the usual overblown espionage fantasies, and one that works very well on its own stealthy terms.

The fact-based "Farewell" ("L'Affaire Farewell") from French director Christian Carion boasts the considerable virtue of seeming to take place in the real world, among genuine (if duplicitous) practitioners of the surveillance and secrets game in the late Cold War era of the early 1980s.

This is fascinating material based on a little-known (to me) case of a Soviet intelligence agent named Vladimir Vetrov, here fictionalized. He provided to French leader Francois Mitterrand a trove of information -- names of KGB agents in France, the U.S. and elsewhere, along with Russian-gathered arms-race blueprints -- thus tipping the balance of power to the West. From this incident, "Farewell" goes its own way, beginning and ending with rifle shots in a remote forest and an ominous flutter of birds. In between the prologue and the epilogue we learn how, and why, one spy's life came to its unnatural end.

It's a story of two people, really. One is the KGB man who squealed, played with a wonderful ease and naturalism by Serbian-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica. The other is his French contact, a businessman based in Moscow. He is played by another filmmaker (well-known as an actor too), Guillaume Canet, who made the popular "Tell No One." The performances are excellent. These two do not appear to be acting, even in extremis. While Carion's film is full of familiar scenarios within scenarios -- hushed meetings in automobiles at night, or a nail-biter of a border crossing -- we never lose sight of the human beings within those scenarios, and the atmosphere rarely feels hyped.

No one's government comes off particularly well in "Farewell."

Fred Ward's supporting performance as Ronald Reagan doesn't come to much, though at least it isn't campy. This complicated but absorbing tale is not told through primarily American eyes (Willem Dafoe plays a CIA figurehead); primarily it's about French and Soviet brinkmanship, and those who succeeded at it, or failed, and one man who died for the risks he took.

 

MPAA rating: NR (violence and language).

Running time: 1:50.

Cast: Guillaume Canet (Pierre); Emir Kusturica (Grigoriev); Ingeborga Dapkunaite (Natasha); Alexandra Maria Lara (Jessica); Fred Ward (Ronald Reagan); Willem Dafoe (Feeney); Philippe Magnan (Francois Mitterrand); Niels Arestrup (Vallier).

Credits: Directed by Christian Carion; written by Eric Raynaud, based on the book "Bonjour Farewell" by Serguei Kostine; produced by Bertrand Faivre and Philip Boeffard. A NeoClassics Films release. In French, Russian and English with English subtitles.

Farewell (L'Affaire Farewell) Movie Review - Guillaume Canet & Emir Kusturica