FAREWELL (2009)

This film is quite accurately described by Netflix as the 'thinking man's spy thriller'.  It has a lot more in common with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than it does with Goldfinger.  In the early 1980's a Soviet Intelligence Colonel, thoroughly disillusioned with the broken promises of his government, starts leaking information in an effort to bring down the USSR.  Because the information he wants to leak concerns the network of Soviet spies in the Western world, especially their intelligence agencies, he decides to leak the information through an unusual channel: a French engineer working in Moscow who smuggles the information back home to Paris and passes it along to a friend in the DST, the domestic intelligence agency of France, thereby completely bypassing the already comprised traditional foreign intelligence routes.  If that description already scares you, then you should know it only covers the first ten or fifteen minutes.



Cerebral and suspenseful, this story is more concerned with its characters and plotting than any gadgets or set pieces.  The repercussions of the spy-craft are shown on two newly elected leaders: Francois Mitterrand, Socialist President of France and part of a coalition government with the French Communist Party, and Ronald Reagan of the USA, who did not much care for Socialism or Communism.  Reagan is played by Fred Ward who, aside from the wardrobe and the wig, opts for performance instead of imitation.  Ward might be best known as Kevin Bacon's partner in Tremors, the villain in Ernest Goes To Jail, or the maniac gun-wielding father in Road Trip, but his Reagan is a minor triumph; lets just say that the stars had to align for Reagan to appear in a French film as anything other than a complete monster and we are richer for it.  He only has a few scenes, but they are all winners, from obsessively viewing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence ("You know I almost made a picture with John Ford once") to engaging in the all-time ultimate poker bluff with the USSR.

The film is shot in beautiful deep focus, allowing every detail to sink in, most effectively in a few white knuckle scenes, like a shadowy rendezvous in a car or a beyond tense border crossing.   Since our unlikely hero is such a perfect candidate precisely because of his unlikeliness (someone else calls his work too sloppy to ever attract suspicion) he quickly finds himself in over his head.  The Colonel guides him thought some of the finer points of living in a closed society where everybody watches everybody: how to feed small nuggets of information to the people tailing you so they're happy, how to bribe checkpoint guards to falsify crossing times, and how to find an absolutely secure location for a conversation (wander the wilderness).

Many of the characters and scenes are composites, or flat out fictional.  Willem Dafoe appears briefly as the ruthlessly pragmatic Director of the CIA 'Feeney' and a quick scene with an up and comer named Gorbachev shows the effectiveness of all the leaked information in exacting change in the stagnant Soviet society.  People in the Western world might read Orwell's 1984 and think, 'that sucks', but sometimes its hard to remember that the science fiction elements of that story are very minimal and that some people really did, and really do, live like that.  The Colonel's teenage son wants nothing more than the simple pleasures of a Queen cassette, but his father must go to great lengths to smuggle in 'decadent' Western music long ago banned.

This movie has no need for sexy hijinks or explosive bombast when its main concern its relationships and interactions.  On a grand scale, the relationship between the USSR and the USA at the closing of an era with France somewhat caught in between; but primarily on a more local scale.  The growing bond between the engineer and the Colonel, and the Colonel's fractured bonds with his wife, his son, his mistress, his co-workers, and most importantly his country.  The best example of the subtlety and nuance of the film might very well be its title; although it was the name of the operation in real life, it comes to have so many meanings over the course of the story right up the closing credits that it almost seems too perfect to have been real.