SnoopyStyle It's 1981 in Moscow. Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet) is low level French diplomat who meets Soviet colonel Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica). Sergei is dismissive of the young diplomat at first. He has a rebellious son at home. He wants to change the world, change the USSR, and sees himself as a patriot. He has an affair with a colleague. Mitterrand keeps the information closely guarded using the information as currency with American president Reagan. Sergei is given the code name 'Farewell'.Based on a book, this has the sound of truth and that's what so compelling. It's not a Bond movie or even a gritty convoluted spy thriller. The meetings are so mundane and so easy. It's not a movie high in tension except for the ending. This is a spy movie with the feel of the real world. It's about a flawed human being but he's never inhuman. There are many changes to the real story. All I know is that it has a sense of the real world.

[email protected] It says something about film marketing that the makers of this nice little film felt it necessary to give featured billing to Willem Dafoe and Diane Kruger, who might be recognizable to American film goers but are certainly not the film's stars. Kruger appears on screen briefly, while Dafoe has a minor and totally unnecessary role. The real stars are Emir Kusturica as Gregoriev, a high ranking Russian intelligence agent who is determined to expose his country's spy network in an effort to bring down the Brezhnev regime, and Guilliaume Canet as a young French businessman serving as Gregoriev's unwilling courier. Credit must also go to Alexandra Maria Lara, the French businessman's beautiful young wife who fears for her family's safety and cannot get a truthful word out of her husband. Kusturica is excellent, Canet is competent and Lara is very good. This is "based on a true story," a phrase that always leaves me wondering where fact expires and invention begins. But it is very well done. The Russian is caught and the young French couple escape by driving from Moscow to the Finnish border in a snow storm. Of some interest are the actors playing Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterrand and Gorbachev, each of whom figures prominently in the story. They're a pretty stiff bunch.

jswollen This film is one of the few I have seen in the last 10 years that accurately depicts the more day to day activities of what a career in spycraft really is. It is less about drinking single malt and shooting machine guns, and more about making intense personal connections with people that have possibly nothing more in common than a shared ideal or goal. Would a KGB/FSB officer have any reason to befriend a low-level Telecom engineer other than to recruit him as a source? The answer is a resounding no, but makes a perfect cover to conduct the types of interactions that make a successful source / handler relationship work.The depictions of a hostile intel environment like Moscow in the 1980's where the average foreign national had a two man car team following at all times with guards reporting movements at a gate outside the house were very accurate. The bugging of the house and bedroom, and the reality that this brings to living in front of a camera and live audience at all times for years on end is very real. Yakov Smirnov's old joke of "In Russia you don't watch television, television watch you," is the very reality of even the modern operating environment in the forbidden environments.(spolier alert) In the beginning of the film, a seasoned gristled KGB colonel conducting a meeting with the untrained Engineer really set the tone for the film. He preferred working with an amateur that was off the radar of the domestic services to a trained professional with a profile and active surveillance team. The amount of time and coordination that goes into a meeting in a hostile environment includes potentially months of planning and days of execution. All of this to pull off a brief meeting or just a passing of documents or money. All of this planning and preparation have their own footprint and limit the longevity of an operation in their own way. Choosing to work with this amateur ensured that the footprint would be dismissible in the beginning, allow rapid multiple meetings, and the cover for action would only erode over time as they made their own operational decisions. This is what would work for exactly the goal of the operation. Short operation with huge results. That and the source seemed to be on a suicide mission. Very accurate.I read in a previous review that they thought the pace was slow or that this narrative was under-paced. I disagree in that the action was very compressed, but real spy work is only exciting when things go bad. If the meetings are conducted securely, there is little more to see and hear than two colleagues discussing politics and events. Again, very accurate. It only gets exciting near the end, and true to reality, excitement only means things have gone horribly wrong.The liaison relationship depicted between the french service and the American service was also very interesting. A never ending cat and mouse game in which both parties assume the other is holding something back and reveal information only as it seems inevitable that the other would learn it. I think the depiction of the two executives of France and the US doing this face to face was a little embellished, but the characters were certainly the ones acting on the intel. The other depictions of the liaison relationships and turf battles among domestic and foreign services within the same country were very accurate and probably underplayed in this story.(Spoiler alert) Finally, the burning of the source in the end by the US was again something that happened (happens) to regularly when the seeming political fallout is larger than the political gain of the intel. This is what really made this such a beautiful character depiction. The fact that the source knew how the varied agencies would let the facts and events unfold. He knew he would be caught, he knew how it would end, and the poem concerning the wolf and the cubs stitched this narrative together in a beautiful way while in no way coming across as ham-handed or forced.In all an excellent movie.

Philby-3 In this film the adage "truth is stranger than fiction" is well demonstrated. The real story of Vladimir Vetrov, the KBG Colonel who leaked vital details of the Soviet spy network to the West in the early 1980's is even more bizarre that the story related here, where Colonel Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kursturica) uses a French electronics engineer Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet), resident in Moscow, to pass secrets to the French domestic intelligence agency, the DST, and on to the CIA. Sergei ruled out using the DSGT, the French external intelligence service because he was aware it had been penetrated by the KGB. As it is the story here is a little lacking in tension despite the larger than life Sergei becoming more and more reckless as the story progresses .Some of the minor parts are pure vaudeville, Fred Ward's Ronald Reagan for example. However the two principals Kursturica and Canet, both prominent film directors, completely contrasting personalities, are very convincing. The 80's cold war atmosphere is well re-created – even the credits are vaguely menacing.As in several recent spy stories "based on real events" the viewer is left with the impression that the West and Soviets had so thoroughly penetrated each other's security defences that they might as well have monthly meetings to hand over each other's secrets. This story does suggest that the Soviet Union was not able to keep up with Western technology, particularly in computing, and in resorting to stealing software the Soviets sowed the seeds of their downfall. In one instance the West was able to feed the Soviets with enough crook software to cripple their gas pipelines and cause a truly big explosion (without injuring a single person, apparently).We do get considerable insight into what motivated Sergei, if not Vetrov (who seems to have been a less admirable character). Sergei is s true believer in communism, but he also fiercely loves his son, whom he wants to inherit something worthwhile. In a way the movie is as much about a parent sacrificing themselves for the sake of their child than the old spy versus spy routine. Froment is a less interesting character, but something inside him keeps him involved with the egregious Sergei despite his own misgivings and that of his wife Jessica (a refugee from East Germany with good reason to be afraid). Perhaps it's the opportunity for an otherwise unremarkable person to do something important. Or maybe he just finds it hard to say "non" to a person as charismatic as Sergei.This film is not an "edge of your seat" suspense thriller but it tells an absorbing story, and is a useful reminder of the spy paranoia that prospered during the cold war.