FarewellComment Te Dire Adieu

Farewell
directed by Christian Carion
with: Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet & Willem Dafoe


I was a Cold War baby: Berlin was sliced in half with barbed wire two days after I was born. I later spent six months in the city before the reunification, only to miss the fall of the Wall. Ever since, I have been living in a country apparently stuck in the war mode, its gearshift long having rusted in place. So it was with a bit of masochistic curiosity that I revisited the dark years as depicted in Christian CarionÕs Farewell, about a little-known espionage case that brought down the USSR. It turned out to be an archeological dig into the frozen past, an excursion into the psyche of the time and the men involved.

The Farewell affair, in which information on the Soviet intelligence network was passed to the French in 1981-82, was as important a milestone in ending that war as the Polish Solidarity movement. The data, leaked from Moscow to the employees of the then-nationalized French technology firm Thomson, was eventually shared with the Reagan administration ÐÐ reluctant at first to accept help from Socialist Mitterand ÐÐ and inspiring its ÒStar WarsÓ bluff.

The two protagonists, a Russian agent named Sergei Gregoriev and his French counterpart Pierre Froment, are as different from each other as the two opposite camps they supposedly represent. Gregoriev, code name Farewell (brought to passionate life by Emir Kusturica, better known as the director of Zivot je cudo and Underground), works for the KGB evaluating information. He is as romantic in temperament as his job will allow. His dissatisfaction with the status quo has led on one hand to his role in espionage, and ÐÐ although he is still deeply in love with his wife ÐÐ an extramarital affair with a colleague on the other. He admires French poetry and music, and believes in personal sacrifices to bring about changes; he wants his son to live in a different world. Froment (Guillaume Canet), an engineer happily married to an East-German-born wife with whom he has two young children, is inadvertently chosen to receive copies of the documents that pass GregorievÕs desk. His initial apprehension gradually turns to excitement; when his wife gets wind of what heÕs up to, he carries on his mission on the sly, like a child in a war game.

The filmmakers dress early-Õ80s Moscow in the reddish brown hues of faded family snapshots, with music and its absence playing crucial roles in defining the social and emotional landscape of this world. GregorievÕs son Igor, like most teenagers behind the Iron Curtain, is obsessed with Western music; given a Sony Walkman brought from Paris by his fatherÕs French connection, Igor executes one of the best Freddie Mercury impersonations ever committed to film. Intercut with the footage of the mustachioed and tights-clad singer, the Russian teen preens and struts: What you see here is the power of uninhibited self-expression. As FromentÕs ÒbusinessÓ and personal contact with Gregoriev deepens, his world grows cluttered with the kind of pop songs now packaged as nostalgia-inducing shopping BGM. When he confides to his French colleague that he has become addicted to the din, he is reassured that he is not being bugged.

Eventually, the inevitable happens and Gregoriev is arrested, to be written off as a dispensable lizardÕs tail by The Free World. Froment, warned by his maid, escapes by car with his family. When they reach the Finnish border, ÒfreedomÓ looks like an icy expanse, devoid of the aural muddle. Igor, having learned the truth about his father from Froment, visits Gregoriev in prison. When the metal shutter begins to descend between them, the father hurtles over the counter to embrace his son. For the forgotten spy, freedom is a warm body, full of the future.

ÐÐ Rika Ohara