Farewell Review

Farewell
Set during the Cold War, this is the true-life story of KGB Colonel Sergei Grigoriev (Kusturica). Grown disillusioned with the Soviet Union he searches for a handler to pass key intel to the West, settling on French businessman Pierre (Canet) for the dangerous task.

by Ian Nathan |
Published on
Release Date:

29 Apr 2011

Running Time:

113 minutes

Certificate:

12A

Original Title:

Farewell

KGB Colonel Grigoriev (auteur Emir Kusturica) can lay claim to having changed the world. Not that you’ve heard of him — he died as a traitor. Under the codename Farewell, he fed the French government intel that the KGB had cracked Western security, right down to White House beverage supplies. Asking for nothing but illicit Queen tapes for his son, his mission went undetected for months — his chosen contact was a French engineer (Guillame Canet), ill-equipped for the espionage game. Grigoriev was the catalyst for Glasnost, but Christian Carion takes a sober approach. The performances are expert, the friendship compelling, but it cries out for a streak of Le Carré’s damp- paved noir to get pulses racing.

Slightly underpowered as an espionage thriller, this is nonetheless a fascinating story told with real panache.
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