French Cinema: L' Affaire Farewell (2009)

Farewell is the story of a successful western espionage operation in the Soviet Union during the 1980s.  The reluctant conduit of information passed was a young French engineer who was recruited to pass information from a disenchanted KGB agent who wished to sabotage the very extensive Soviet spy network acquiring technology of military usefulness from around the world.   French intelligence recruited the young engineer to perform this task over a period of several years which was then brought to the attention of the CIA, President Reagan, through high level contacts involving President Mitterrand. 

The Soviet KGB double agent ran great personal risks to pass this information, wanting nothing but the occasional bottle of wine and copies of music from the American rock group, "Queen" for his teenage son.  

This turned the lives of the engineer and the double agent into a pressure cooker that compromised their marriages and the relationships with their family.  

To complicate matters even further, the KGB agent had a mistress who, like his wife was not party to the spying.  The engineer lived with his wife in a French compound under constant surveillance by the Soviets including a housekeeper who regularly went through their belongings as part of the massive informer network then in operation in the Soviet Union, where every babushka was potentially another pair of eyes for the KGB.    The story as told in the film is a cat and mouse game of deception and counter-deception that makes for a tale that I could not turn away from.  

Inevitably as these operations go, things go wrong, and the wheels eventually come off the operation. 

The subsequent desperate situation it puts the double agent and the engineer led to a gripping sequence of events which made the film a thoroughly satisfying thriller.  The portrayals of Mitterrand, Reagan, and Gorbachev and high level meetings in the White House, Kremlin, and the Elysee Palace were convincing imaginings of how the intelligence transactions at the highest levels of government might have taken place.  In short it is one of the best spy thrillers I have seen.