Film: Farewell

The trailer for Farewell - released in Paris this week - was so dull I nearly didn't bother to go and see the film. The problem with selling Cold War thrillers to the masses is that realistic spy movies have little truck with trailer-friendly stunts, explosions and one-liners. But as any reader of Le Carré knows, the world of espionage is a world of smoke and mirrors, where no-one is who they appear to be, and where cynicism and expediency rub shoulders with slow-burning paranoia. In the right hands, these ingredients can have you on the edge of your seat, and fortunately for us, the hands of French writer-director Christian Carion are as safe as they come.

Carion, who scored a minor arthouse hit with Joyeux Noël (also released under the title Merry Christmas), based his screenplay on Serguei Kostine's book about the hitherto little-known story of Vladimir Vetrov, an official in the KGB who in the early 1980s passed so much information to the West it seems the Soviets had little choice but to initiate perestroika. And he passed it, not to a slick spymaster, but to a French engineer in the employ of the French embassy in Moscow. The documents revealed that Soviet intelligence knew about everything, from the design of the space shuttle to the entry-codes of the White House, and were handed to the newly elected François Mitterrand, who duly passed them to Ronald Reagan. The French intelligence service gave Vetrov the codename "Farewell".

Carion's film covers an astonishing amount of geographical and narrative ground and juggles three languages - Russian, French and English - but never loses its way. Like every epic undertaking worth its salt, it balances the political with the personal, and so prominence is given, not to the clash of nations and their leaders (Philippe Magnan as a sly Mitterrand, Fred Ward bluff and charismatic as Reagan) nor to operators in the field (three of the actors from Joyeux Noël - Diane Kruger, Benno Fürmann and Gary Lewis - pop up in walk-on spy roles), but to the brace of personalities at the heart of the intrigue, both played by well-known actor/directors. Emir Kusturica is heartbreaking as Gregoriev, an amiable bear of a man who betrays his country only because he believes his country has betrayed the principles of Communism. Guillaume Canet is suitably jittery as Froment, the mild-mannered middle-man dragged into the affair against his will. Meanwhile, the secrecy puts a strain on both men's family lives.

Farewell is destined to be this year's The Lives of Others. It's more ambitious in scale and inevitably less successful as intimate drama, but not by much. There's humour in the early stages; francophile Gregoriev is less interested in financial reward than in French poetry and acquiring cassettes of the rock band Queen for his rebellious son. The production design, evoking Moscow in the 1980s, is meticulous but unobtrusive, though I can't recall ever having seen so many Ladas in a single film, and there are inevitably fur hats aplenty.

But as the stakes are raised, with Gregoriev increasingly reckless as he forages openly in secret files or strolls out of his office carrying bags stuffed with classified documents, so the tension ratchets up. There's one sequence, near the end, which flirts with standard spy thriller clichés, but the ending is devastating on both the personal and the political level. As you knew it would be.

Official site (in French)