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| Farewell | |||
"If you’ve ever wondered what led to the collapse of the Soviet empire, Farewell offers an intriguing answer. Based on a true story, it introduces us to a high-up KGB officer who smuggled hundreds of pages of key top-secret Soviet documents to NATO in 1981 and ‘82, apparently doing as much as any other single person to bring down the Russian bureaucracy. Recapturing that slice of long-buried history is just one of the pleasures of watching this surefooted thriller, which samples a multiplex’s worth of genres… to come up with a wryly witty, understated style of its own." – Elise Nakhnikian, Slant Magazine "In the mesmerizing French spy movie Farewell, which is based on a true story, the time is April, 1981, in a sunny but morose Moscow. Monolithic statues of scowling Soviet heroes loom over public squares and parks, a farcical reminder of old victories, old illusions. Groups of white-shirted children, perhaps the only citizens who still believe in the country’s greatness, march around bravely, singing patriotic songs. In a mood of fervent disgust, a KGB colonel, Sergei Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica), decides that, if the country is to survive, the old order must be destroyed. He approaches a young French engineer, Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet), who is working in Moscow for a French company, and dumps important secrets in his lap, including the names of KGB agents and industrial spies working in America and Europe…. Froment is intrigued by Grigoriev, who wants neither money nor asylum and is more than willing to face death. Violating every canon of spycraft, Grigoriev meets Froment openly — in the subway, in automobiles, at a playground. The men, utterly different in temperament, fight like a married couple but draw close, sharing personal as well as professional secrets. The director, Christian Carion, must have wanted the clash of strong personalities … because he chose as his stars two prominent movie directors. Kusturica, now in his mid-fifties and best known here as the director of When Father Was Away on Business (1985), is a formidable-looking intellectual bruiser, with a barrel chest, a heavy brow, and deep-set eyes. His Grigoriev is playfully aggressive, a sardonic wit, a nonchalant sexual dynamo … Grigoriev’s despair gives him a kind of defiant gaiety … Kusturica is enormously charismatic — watching him, we think that no mere actor could project this much authority. And Guillaume Canet, the director of Tell No One (2007), holds up his end. Handsome in an assistant-professorish way — neatly clipped beard, horn-rimmed glasses — he makes Froment an irritable young man who has abundant personal ambition but no particular values. Canet has a natural severity, Kusturica a natural flirtatiousness. It’s an odd-couple movie, with the world at stake." – David Denby, New Yorker |
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| L'affaire farewell, France 2009 | |||
Director: Christian Carion With: Emir Kusturica (Grigoriev), Guillaume Canet (Pierre), Alexandra Maria Lara (Jessica), Ingeborga Dapkunaite (Natasha) Dina Korzun (Alina), Evgenie Kharlanov (Igor), William Dafoe (Feeney), Philippe Magnan (François Mitterrand), Fred Ward (Ronald Reagan) 113 mins, DV (16:9) In French, English and Russian, with English subtitles M low level offensive language Palmerston North Film Society |
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