L’Affaire Farewell

It’s ultimately difficult to envision most viewers finding much within L’Affaire Farewell worth embracing, as the movie suffers from an impenetrable and thoroughly convoluted sensibility that effectively cements its status as a sporadically intriguing yet hopelessly uninvolving political thriller. Set in the early 1980s, the movie follows French engineer Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet) as he becomes the contact person for a Russian spy (Emir Kusturica’s Sergei Grigoriev) – with complications ensuing as more and more people become aware of Pierre and Sergei’s surreptitious exploits (including Willem Dafoe’s head of the CIA and Fred Ward’s Ronald Reagan). It’s clear almost instantly that scripter Eric Raynaud is concerned primarily with exploring the political ramifications of Pierre and Sergei’s ongoing spy games, as there’s never a point at which either character manages to become as fully fleshed-out as one might’ve hoped. There’s little doubt, however, that even the non-political stuff falls disappointingly short, with the proliferation of almost eye-rollingly silly plot twists lending the proceedings the feel of a second-rate melodrama (eg Sergei’s affair with a coworker is discovered by his son). It’s a shame, really, given that the central characters’ increasingly perilous situation should’ve resulted in a number of tense sequences, yet there’s never a point at which the viewer is able to work up any real enthusiasm or concern for their respective fates. And while the novelty of Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan does carry the scant English-language interludes for a little while, it’s worth noting that, like everything else within L’Affaire Farewell, even these moments ultimately lose their entertainment value. The inclusion of one or two genuinely suspenseful moments (eg a dialogue-free montage detailing the arrest of several spies (including one inexplicably played by Diane Kruger)) ensures that the film never quite becomes an all-out wash, yet the promise of the premise and the uniformly strong cast invariably force one to wonder what could have been.

** out of ****