Farewell (***)

The dissolution of the Soviet Union is one of those things that happened fairly recently yet seems like ancient history. The dynamic of the Cold War disappeared in a very short time; nor is anything similar likely to happen soon. And this film implies that it will tell us how it all unraveled. It all started in 1981, with a Soviet colonel (Emir Kusturica) who decided to spill some secrets. That it was a French engineer (Guillaime Canet) working in Moscow who became his contact is one of the more peculiar aspects of the story, and why the director is not an American, but Christian Carion, who made Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noël), another tale of a rapprochement among enemies.

Carion bookends the movie with the most suspenseful parts, but the midsection is practically a buddy film. The colonel, having an affair, talks to the engineer about marital issues. At one point he warns his new partner that the KGB bugs the bedrooms of foreigners and sends women to seduce men who seem not to be getting any at home. “If you want peace, screw your wife,” he says. In return for such advice, he receives French champagne and cassettes of Queen (for his teenage son) and Leo Ferré (for himself). Occasionally there are meetings involving the French premier, François Mitterand, and his American counterpart. It may be for the best that there’s only a few of these scenes, as Fred Ward’s Ronald Reagan impersonation is pretty weak. (Willem Defoe, the best known American in the cast, plays a fictionalized CIA director.)

Probably the story could have been made to seem more suspenseful. Even though the Frenchman’s wife tells him she’s frightened for their kids, and the Russian allows his son to hate him for being a Soviet stooge rather than tell him what he’s really doing, I rarely had a sense of danger during their meetings. As for ending the Cold War, maybe the dots need to be connected more. Clearly the information provided was a coup for the French and the Americans, who learned the identities of spies working for the USSR as well as the extent of the KGB’s intelligence operation. But it’s not that clear from the film that the events portrayed helped precipitate perestroika or assisted its architect, Mikhail Gorbachev, in consolidating power.

The movie is worth watching as a portrait of an communist-era Moscow and as a character drama, but lacks the power of great spy thrillers.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/26/10