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 Carion’s 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 –– reluctant at first to accept help from Socialist
Mitterand –– and inspiring its “Star Wars” 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 –– although he is still deeply in love with his wife –– 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 Gregoriev’s desk. His initial apprehension gradually turns to
excitement; when his wife gets wind of what he’s up to, he carries on his
mission on the sly, like a child in a war game.
The filmmakers dress early-’80s 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.
Gregoriev’s son Igor, like most teenagers behind the Iron Curtain, is
obsessed with Western music; given a Sony Walkman brought from Paris by his
father’s 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 Froment’s
“business” 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 lizard’s tail by The Free World. Froment, warned by his maid, escapes
by car with his family. When they reach the Finnish border, “freedom” 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.