Farewell | |
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![]() United States theatrical poster | |
Directed by | Christian Carion |
Written by | Christian Carion |
Produced by | Philip Boëffard Bertrand Faivre Christophe Rossignon |
Starring | Guillaume Canet Emir Kusturica Alexandra Maria Lara Willem Dafoe Fred Ward |
Cinematography | Walther van den Ende |
Edited by | Andrea Sedlácková |
Music by | Clint Mansell |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Pathé |
Release dates |
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Running time | 113 minutes |
Country | France |
Languages | French Russian English |
Budget | $21 million [1] |
Box office | $7.4 million [2] |
Farewell (French : L'affaire Farewell; literally The Farewell Affair) is a 2009 French espionage thriller film directed by Christian Carion, starring Guillaume Canet and Emir Kusturica. The film is loosely based on the actions of the high-ranking KGB official, Vladimir Vetrov. It was released in the United States in June 2010. [3] It was adapted from the book Bonjour Farewell: La vérité sur la taupe française du KGB (1997) by Serguei Kostine.
The movie was filmed in Ukraine and Finland because Russia refused to provide a permit for filming in Moscow. A Reuters news item also stated that the government "dissuaded Russian movie actor Sergei Makovetsky and Russian producer and director Nikita Mikhalkov from participating in the film" (according to the director). [4]
In the early 1980s, a high-ranking KGB analyst, Sergei Grigoriev, disillusioned with the Soviet regime, decides to pass Soviet secrets, including a list of their spies, to the government of France, then under the newly elected President François Mitterrand, a Socialist in coalition with the Communist Party. Grigoriev (code-named Farewell by the French intelligence service) hopes to force change in the Soviet Union by revealing their extensive network of spies trying to acquire scientific, technical and industrial information from the West. He uses Pierre Froment, a naïve French engineer based in Moscow, as his unlikely intermediary. After the first transfer of information, Pierre confides in his wife Jessica, who is adamant about his stopping this activity in order to safeguard their family. Grigoriev persuades Pierre to continue without telling Jessica. He will accept neither money nor defection as a reward, but sometimes requests small gifts from Pierre's trips to France, such as a Sony Walkman and Queen cassette tapes for his son, some cognac, or books of French poetry. As Farewell's prodigious output blossoms, the French are bewildered by the sheer scale and yield of top Western technology transferred covertly to the Soviets.
Under suspicion that he is not a trustworthy ally, Mitterrand personally hands U.S. President Ronald Reagan a dossier of invaluable Farewell data during the Ottawa G7 summit. The Americans are astounded with it and other information provided by Farewell, culminating in the full "List X" of Soviet spies within the highest echelons of the Western scientific and industrial apparatus. They embark on an ambitious plan to feed the Soviets erroneous or defective data; shortly afterwards, the network of Soviet technology spies in the West is rolled up, and Reagan announces the "Star Wars" antimissile shield project. Deprived of hi-tech information from the West, and with their own laboratories falling behind, the Soviet leadership panics. Seeing this desperate impasse for what it is, Mikhail Gorbachev, then an upwards-mobile party official, starts preparing the reform policies he is to pursue in the future.
Grigoriev's superior, a double agent for the CIA, is directed by them to sacrifice Grigoriev and save the Froments, all unbeknownst to the French. Grigoriev, under arrest and KGB interrogation, plays dumb to give the Froments time to escape. They cover their tracks and flee by car to the Finnish border. While in West Germany for debriefing, Pierre pleads with the CIA Director to save Grigoriev, praising his integrity and selflessness. The director refuses as a policy principle, having brought the other agent to the West. Grigoriev is granted his request of execution by a marksman on the jetty of the snow-clad lake he loves. Pierre is later offered a company job in Manhattan.
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 77 reviews, with an average rating of 7.06/10. [5] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 74 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [6]
Emir Kusturica is a Bosnian born Serbian film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and musician. He also has French citizenship. Kusturica is one of the most distinguished European filmmakers active since the mid-1980s, best known for surreal and naturalistic movies that express deep sympathies for people from the margins. He has also been recognized for his projects in town-building. He has competed at the Cannes Film Festival on five occasions and won the Palme d'Or twice, as well as the Best Director prize for Time of the Gypsies.
Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is a Russian senior official and politician who has been serving as the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation on the Issues of Environmental Activities, Ecology and Transport since 12 August 2016. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
The Farewell Dossier was the collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector "en place", gathered and gave to the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) in 1981–82, during the Cold War.
Smiley's People is a spy novel by British writer John le Carré, published in 1979. Featuring British master-spy George Smiley, it is the third and final novel of the "Karla Trilogy", following Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. George Smiley is called out of retirement to investigate the death of one of his old agents: a former Soviet general, the head of an Estonian émigré organisation based in London. Smiley learns the general had discovered information that will lead to a final confrontation with Smiley's nemesis, the Soviet spymaster Karla.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed Hero and Yoga was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, including the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War (ISBN 0-89141-821-0) is a 2004 autobiographical book about Thomas C. Reed's experience at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory through his time as an advisor to President Ronald Reagan. It reveals new details about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Farewell Dossier, and other facets of the Cold War.
The 9th G7 Summit was held at Williamsburg, Virginia, United States between May 28 and 30, 1983. The venue for the summit meetings was Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov was a high-ranking KGB spy during the Cold War who decided to covertly release valuable information to France and NATO on the Soviet Union's clandestine program aimed at stealing technology from the West.
Marian Zacharski, is a former Polish intelligence officer, arrested in 1981 and convicted of espionage against the United States. After four years in prison, he was exchanged for American agents on Berlin's famous Glienicke Bridge. Arguably, he was one of the most famous officers of the Polish intelligence service. In 1996, prosecutors in Warsaw charged him with flagrant mismanagement at the Pewex company, and Gorzów Wielkopolski police want to question him about illegal car trading.
Christian Carion is a French film director, dialogue writer and screenwriter, gaining international attention for Joyeux Noël , which was nominated for several awards, including the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Yuri Borysovych Shvets is a former Soviet intelligence officer of Ukrainian origin. He was a Major in the KGB between 1980 and 1990. From April 1985 to 1987, he was a resident spy in Washington, D.C. While there, he held a cover job as a correspondent for TASS, a Soviet state-owned news agency.
The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera, was a covert research-and-development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the laboratory manufactured and tested poisons, and was reportedly reactivated by the Russian government in the late 1990s.
Georgiy Stepanovich Zhzhenov, was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor and writer. He is known for playing the spy Mikhail Tulyev in the "Resident" quartet of films, Beware of the Car (1966), The Hot Snow (1973), and many others, and was a popular actor. He was appointed People's Artist of the USSR in 1980.
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Gus W. Weiss was a White House policy adviser on technology, intelligence and economic affairs who worked primarily on national security, intelligence and concerns on technology transfers to communist countries.
The 38th annual Venice International Film Festival was held on 2 to 12 September, 1981.
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The Academy of Foreign Intelligence is one of the primary espionage academies of Russia, and previously the Soviet Union, serving the KGB and its successor organization, the Foreign Intelligence Service. It was attended by future President Vladimir Putin during the 1980s.
Xavier Ameil was a French engineer. He worked for Thomson-CSF and helped pass information from the anti-Soviet spy Vladimir Vetrov to NATO.
Philippe Grumbach (1924–2003) was a French journalist and writer, who also engaged in film producing. He worked at L'Express magazine for twenty-four years, becoming in the 1970s its editor-in-chief. In 2024, many years after his death, it was revealed that he had been a Soviet spy throughout his career.