O traveller I understand you well, your final gaze went to my very soul.

Farewell
Christian Carion 2009 France
Starring: Guillaume Canet, Emir Kusturica, Alexandra Maria Lara, Willem Dafoe, Fred Ward, Niels Arestrup, Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė, Dina Korzun, David Soul, Philippe Magnan

Farewell, Christian Carion's loose rendering of the Vladimir Vetrov espionage case, starts off simply and generically enough with text setting the scene firmly in the Reagan/Mitterrand/Brezhnev political era. What's less common though is that it refuses to state its support for any one side, in fact remaining entirely neutral and leaving it to the viewer to decide whose side they take, at least in the opening moments. The bantering relationship between the leads, played by the French actor/director Guillaume Canet and the Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica (surprisingly brilliant in a rare on-screen role) respectively, coupled with the intrinsic paranoia of the age helps in that, even as they bond over Baudelaire and Queen, betrayal hangs in the air and either's sincerity could easily be a mask concealing a deeper, more ominous agenda. Kusturica's Grigoriev (Vetrov) is a colonel in the KGB, albeit one who privately calls Brezhnev "an old fool", passing secrets to the Socialist-leaning French government represented by Canet's engineer come intermediary Pierre. Pierre seems somewhat naïve to Grigoriev's experienced belligerence but again both could be a façade. What they are both naïve to however is the fact that Mitterrand is securing America's support by handing the reports to Reagan (portrayed with sufficient slimy arrogance by Fred Ward) and that the change the leads are hoping to bring about is actually assisting in US capitalism. By this point America may be the evil empire, willing to sacrifice anyone for control, but the other two countries are close behind and in a nice twist the prospective job so desired by Pierre is in Manhattan, a sign of his possible future corruption. Carion takes similar risks throughout touting the power of sex (at least over men) as an equal threat to integrity as the desire for revolution and experimenting with camera work in images such as a snowbound execution shot as if from the point of view of a watching wolf. I promise it's much better than I make that sound. The cast is rounded out by Willem Dafoe giving his best callous creep as the director of the CIA, virtuoso French actor Niels Arestrup (never bad) as his opposite number in the DST, David Soul (God help us all) as Reagan's chief aide and Alexandra Maria Lara (really not given much to do other than object) as Pierre's wife. Overall the film is a superior spy picture but things really aren't helped by Carion's assumption of the viewer's prior knowledge of Cold War politics in the early 1980's as the fast-moving narrative means that, if you don't have a decent grasp of the information, you'll be likely to lose track by the end of the first hour.