Movie Review: Farewell

Guillaume Canet, a French matinee idol, plays against type in <i>The Farewell.</i> Photo / Supplied

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: True lies.

All things considered, being a spy in real life is probably more like what's depicted in this literate and well-constructed French thriller than in the high-octane Bourne films.

The two men at the centre of the events that became known in Paris as "l'affaire Farewell" are remarkable mainly for being so unremarkable. And it doesn't detract from the film's effectiveness that it shows us how much strife you can get into with the wife and kids when all you're trying to do is end the Cold War.

The plot is drawn from a little-known true story - although writer-director Carion hedges his bets by fictionalising all the characters - about a KGB colonel, Vladimir Vetrov, who in 1981 passed to the West documents detailing Russia's knowledge of its intelligence networks and technology.

In the film's version of events, his conduit is Pierre Froment (Canet), a slightly geeky engineer working in the Moscow office of a French electronics firm. The spy, renamed Sergei Gregoriev (and played personably but with a dry inscrutability by the great Serbian director Kusturica), is a character of both moral complexity and ethical fibre: he never seeks money for his work, although he does ask the Frenchman to get a "Johnny Walkman" and some "Keen" (Queen) tapes for his disaffected teenage son, Igor.

Thus neither man is the heroic cliche of the genre: Gregoriev is doing what he's doing for the sake of Igor's future, but he is also carrying on an ill-advised affair - it seems driven less by passion than by existential ennui which somehow serves to heighten his tragic dignity - and Froment (Canet, a French matinee idol, playing brilliantly against type) is a clumsy, awkward figure, who has to lie to his shrill and bossy wife.

The film is less successful in the sequences showing French president Francois Mitterrand (Philippe Magnan) and his US counterpart Ronald Reagan (Fred Ward). The earnest docudrama feel undermines the tension that has been building and matters are made worse by a too-pat closing summation by a shadowy agent, played by Willem Dafoe.

But on the strength of its main story alone - an intense variant of the buddies-under-pressure genre that comes close to being a love story - this is heady stuff. And barely four months after President Obama expelled 10 Russian agents from the US, it may need to be read as more than a history lesson.

LOWDOWN

Cast: Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet
Director: Christian Carion
Running time: 112 mins
Rating: M, low-level offensive language.
In French, Russian and English with English subtitles

-TimeOut