Farewell to the Soviet Union

Stephen Holden has a review of the new French movie, Farewell, about "true, surprisingly little-known events that hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union"; gotta see that:

Based on true, surprisingly little-known events that hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union, Christian Carion’s espionage drama, “Farewell (L’Affaire Farewell),” is a refreshing reminder in the age of the Bourne movies that spies are real people leading everyday lives. (We’ll know more about that when a movie is made about the ten Russian agents sent home this month by the United States.)
The film’s principal characters are portrayed by two leading European filmmakers: the Serbian director Emir Kusturica (Underground) plays the KGB colonel Sergei Grigoriev, and the French director Guillaume Canet (Tell No One) is his French connection, Pierre Froment. Sergei is based on the real-life Vladimir Vetrov, whose code name, given to him by the French intelligence service, was Farewell. The movie’s staking out of a (sometimes shaky) middle ground between serious comedy and high-tech fantasy is a considerable accomplishment that deglamorizes spying as an occupation by making it look a little silly.
Sergei, disenchanted with Communism under Leonid Brezhnev, is a bulky, bearish middle-aged man with a wife, Natasha (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), and a rebellious teenage son, Igor (Evgenie Kharlanov). The hot-headed Igor, who dismisses Brezhnev as “an old fool”, spends his spare time listening to forbidden Western rock (he is obsessed with Queen) through headphones attached to a cassette recorder while doing his homework. For no obvious reason Sergei reactivates an old romance with Alina (Dina Korzun), a blond KGB translator who becomes besotted with him.
Although Sergei still believes in Communist ideals, Soviet life under Brezhnev is so immobilized by bureaucracy that it is becoming dysfunctional. Daily existence in Moscow is steeped in an atmosphere of paranoia and duplicity tinged with a sense of expectation; things have to change. In passing top-secret documents to Pierre, a nervous, low-level milquetoast who works for a French company in Moscow, Sergei hopes to weaken the Soviet Union and allow a freer life for Igor, who has no knowledge of his father’s traitorous activities.
Because Sergei can’t reveal the truth to the contemptuous Igor (they come to blows in one scene), the father’s loneliness and isolation lend the character a tragic nobility deepened by Mr. Kusturica’s sad, world-weary portrayal.
The only rewards he seeks for handing over priceless information are goodies from Paris: brandy, chocolates, Champagne, and a Walkman (he calls it a Johnny Walkman) and Queen cassettes (he calls the band Keen) for Igor. He is also a devotee of the melancholy French singer-songwriter Léo Ferré and a lover of French poetry. Alfred de Vigny’s Death of the Wolf becomes a metaphor for the life and stoic philosophy of a man resigned to being a silent loner.
Pierre, who looks a little like a young Woody Allen, is a father of two, with a bossy, hysterical wife, Jessica (Alexandra Maria Lara), who hates her husband’s double life so much that he lies and tells her he has abandoned espionage. For the frightened Pierre, the passing of secret information— about spacecrafts, the locations of nuclear submarines, radar positions, communication codes, and, most important, the “X list” of Soviet spies around the world— is like handling radioactive material. But it is also exciting. The exchanges from hand to hand are carried out brazenly in broad daylight on park benches, and in the subway.
Once the story is set in motion, Farewell somewhat awkwardly hopscotches from Moscow to Paris to Washington and back. Among the heads of state, we see a grim François Mitterrand (Philippe Magnan) and a jocular Ronald Reagan (Fred Ward). Mr. Ward’s shaky impersonation of Reagan, who is shown watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is the closest that Farewell comes to outright farce. The movie presents Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, as a possible bluff to intimidate Russia with fantasies of America’s superior defense technology.
If the outlines of the story are true, Farewell, based on Serguei Kostine’s novel Bonjour Farewell, is still not a movie to be trusted for its facts, which have been stretched around a screenplay (by Eric Raynaud) that becomes more conventional as the film goes along. When it comes to actual historical details, Farewell crams too many notions into expositional blips of dialogue. And the scenes of conferences in the corridors of power, whether in Moscow, Paris or Washington, are strained and abrupt.
Late in the day, Farewell falls back on conventional thriller tactics to amp up suspense. As Pierre and his family make a mad dash by car to the Finnish border, Sergei faces the consequences of his actions. Loose ends are neatly tied up in a monologue by a cold, omniscient American intelligence agent (Willem Dafoe) who reveals more secrets. At this point fiction trumps truth, and we are in the comfortable land of Jason Bourne, James Bond and their technocratic ilk.

The movie opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Christian Carion; written by Eric Raynaud, based on the novel Bonjour Farewell by Serguei Kostine; director of photography, Walther Vanden Ende; edited by Andréa Sedlackova; music by Clint Mansell; sets by Jean-Michel Simonet; costumes by Corinne Jorry; produced by Bertrand Faivre and Philip Boëffard; released by NeoClassics Films. In French, English, and Russian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. This film is not rated.
With Emir Kusturica (Grigoriev), Guillaume Canet (Pierre), Alexandra Maria Lara (Jessica), Ingeborga Dapkunaite (Natasha), Dina Korzun (Alina), Evgenie Kharlanov (Igor), Willem Dafoe (Feeney), Philippe Magnan (François Mitterrand) and Fred Ward (Ronald Reagan).

Rico says it should be good; it's French, it's political, and it's got Willem Dafoe in some minor role...