New Anti-Soviet Film Farewell Depicts Spycraft That Won the Cold War

By Jason Apuzzo. According to The New York Times today, the Cold War is back.  Have they been reading Libertas?

Not only is the Angelina Jolie Russian spy thriller Salt opening later this month – a film which, incidentally, has already been banned in China; not only is the Red Dawn remake being released later this year (presumably); not only is Mao’s Last Dancer coming out later this summer, but so too on July 23rd is a new French Cold War thriller called Farewell being released starring (among others) Willem Defoe, and Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan.  The film deals with one of the crucial Cold War espionage coups that delivered vital intelligence to America and the West.  The film opens July 23rd in New York and Los Angeles, spreading to other markets all the way through September.  Farewell showed at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals earlier this year, and has already received glowing reviews from Todd McCarthy (formerly of Variety), as well as Stephen Holden of The New York Times and Jeff Stein of The Washington Post.  You can watch the trailer to the film below.

Farewell tells the true story of a disenchanted K.G.B. colonel named ‘Sergei Grigoriev’ (the real colonel was actually named Vladimir Vetrov)  — eventually code-named ‘Farewell’ by Western spy agencies – who decides that he can no longer serve the Soviet state, and consequently chooses to funnel classified information to French intelligence agents.

This intelligence apparently included information on what the Soviets knew about our air defenses, how much the Soviets were spending on defense, what defense technologies they were stealing from the United States, and also a list of highly placed K.G.B. agents who’d infiltrated government and industry in the West.  The leaking of this information, when later combined with President Reagan’s public commitment to create the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system, were crucial elements in the winning of the Cold War.

The French angle on this story is twofold: the courier for the secret information was Pierre Froment, an otherwise innocent employee of a French multinational corporation.  And the information itself was eventually transmitted to Ronald Reagan by then-French President François Mitterrand.

The trailer for the film certainly looks compelling.  Here’s some of what Todd McCarthy said about the film while he was with Variety: “A harrowing, richly human and well-acted espionage tale. … It’s juicy, fascinating stuff, well orchestrated, and finely thesped.  [Director Christian] Carion keeps things simmering on medium-high heat throughout.”

I welcome the release of this film, and we’ll certainly be reviewing it here at LFM.  It’s quite wonderful – indeed, one is tempted to say euphoria-inducing – to come across a major film that actually treats the fall of the communism as a positive social development.  This kind of imaginative breakthrough is much more interesting to me than anything Christopher Nolan is depicting in Inception, in part because it’s so long overdue.

If there is a Cold War that really needs to be thawed, it’s the cinematic one against the Cold War era itself – and the values that animated it.  Outside of a handful of effective thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, Ice Station Zebra or the Clint Eastwood classic Firefox (read this recent commentary on Firefox over at the Turner Classic Movies blog), the Cold War has rarely been dealt with thoughtfully or ambitiously by Western filmmakers – particularly while it was actually going on.  It’s possible that all of this is beginning to change, at least in the world of independent filmmaking (one inevitably thinks of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others here).  My sense is that as the War on Terror drags on – seemingly with little end in sight – we are perhaps missing our old adversaries the Soviets, who at least had the sophistication and (perhaps) basic human decency to understand when the grand chess match of the Cold War was actually over, unlike today’s suicidal, apres-nous-le-deluge Islamofascists.

In any case, we’ll look forward to learning more about this film in coming days.

Posted on July 12th, 2010 at 1:07pm.