Farewell

Farewell

98 Minutes

Emir Kusturica’s films have transformed the heavy hand of the Soviet monolith into something distinctly mythical, depicted from a confused child’s eyes in the When Father Was Away on Business and the depths of a subterranean town in Underground. The Serbian director’s starring role in Christian Carion’s quietly remarkable Farewell thus feels like both a shift and a further chance to explore this dynamic, in a film which ports the terse vocabulary of the spy thriller onto the smaller structure of the family drama. Its characters may spy, but they’re not spies. They’re flawed everymen, watching helplessly as their double lives collapse in on one another.

Roger Ebert once wrote that the people in noir films “have lifestyles, not lives,” a quote which also holds true for most spy movies, where the characters are wafer-thin tokens, primed to be nudged and flipped by the story. Farewell takes the onion-peeling route most of these espionage yarns pursue, uncovering games within games and conspiracies within conspiracies, but it retains its center through a dual devotion to its characters and its relative realism. Files are exchanged and codenames are given, but the main characters all seem to be in over their heads, clumsy people with deep wells of emotion and unbreakable family ties.

Kusturica plays Sergei Gregoriev, a Russian colonel disenchanted with the USSR of the early ’80s, who ready to set the stage for a new revolution. He recalls the supposed glory days of the ’20s and ’30s to Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet) an engineer-by-day who finds himself increasingly uncomfortable with his extracurricular activities, especially as their business relationship begins turning friendlier.

Pierre heads the French side of the story’s three-layered dynamic, acting as the middleman for Soviet secrets funneled over to the Americans, who accept them as a gesture of goodwill from the newly elected Francois Mitterand. Mitterand uses this intelligence as a bargaining chip, to keep the US close despite their repulsion at his communist party cabinet members. The self-interest of nearly everyone involved becomes a key element in the film, especially as questions arise to what the Americans are doing with the information.

Despite a primary Moscow setting, there are no Russian actors here, due to a government ban on appearing in a film deemed to celebrate a traitor. If Farewell has one distinct fault it might be this, its bland sanctification of Sergei, who turns traitor out of devotion to both his country and to his family, primarily a son who smuggles cassette tapes and obsesses over Queen. The colonel is so defined by his family ties that lines from Alfred De Vigny’s “The Death of the Wolf,” about a father wolf that gives its life for its cubs, becomes his running motif, a snappy touch that feels out of place in an otherwise measured script.

This seriousness is further dented by a cheesy handling of Ronald Reagan (Fred Ward) who’s presented as one half of a weird vaudeville dynamic with an assistant named Hutton. Watching a scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, on repeat, the President remarks that he could have worked with John Ford if he’d wanted, cementing an already obvious connection.

But these are brief diversions in an otherwise solid movie, ones that Willem Dafoe’s steely portrayal of a CIA agent helps correct, imbuing the American side of the story with renewed gravity, If Farewell doesn’t as successfully marry high and low culture elements as Spielberg’s Munich, it does do a commendable job of keeping the two sides together, filling hollow spy tropes with feeling and life.

by Jesse Cataldo