Indie Focus: ‘Farewell’

That recent spy swap aside, most people might assume the suspicions and paranoia of the Cold War are things of the past — until someone tries to make a film set during the Cold War. French filmmaker Christian Carion ran into a series of bureaucratic roadblocks while trying to make the fact-based Russian-Franco-American espionage story “Farewell.”

The movie is based on a real episode: During the early 1980s, a mid-level Russian functionary, Vladimir Vetrov, began passing highly classified information, including the identities of KGB spies throughout the West, to French intelligence, who referred to him by the codename “Farewell.” In turn, the French handed the intelligence over to the United States, but among Farewell’s contacts was a French civilian engineer working in Moscow, referred to in the film as Pierre Froment.

As Carion tells it, he was not officially allowed to shoot in Moscow, although he did steal a few shots there by claiming he was working on a Coca-Cola commercial. (“The right name to do anything anywhere,” he joked on the phone from Paris.) Instead, he shot his scenes set in Russia in the Ukraine and Finland.

As well, Carion said he was unable to cast an actual Russian in the role of Farewell because of actors’ fears of reprisals back home. The problem turned into something of a positive, as Carion ultimately cast both his two lead roles with acclaimed directors. The Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, whose eccentric screen presence fills the role with a sense of disillusionment, wounded pride and wary intelligence, plays Farewell, while his French counterpart is played by director and actor Guillaume Canet.

For all the film’s cloak-and-dagger trappings, it remains squarely focused on the personal concerns of the two men at its story’s core. Rather than a full-on action picture, the film predicates nearly all its spy stuff on the two men simply talking, not about world affairs but about themselves and their lives. The simple tensions of losing their jobs or families, the dangers of being discovered, create the backbone for the film’s drama.

“It’s not at all a James Bond movie,” said Carion, whose “Merry Christmas” was nominated for the foreign-language Academy Award. “There is no car crash, no gun, no James Bond girls, nothing at all. Just two guys talking about life, about poetry, about their wives and so on.”

Carion first learned of the story of Farewell while reading a book by Jacques Attali, onetime aide to former French President François Mitterand. Producer Christophe Rossignon later showed Carion a script by Eric Raynaud that described the episode from the French and American perspectives. Carion then filtered information from the book “Bonjour Farewell” by Serguei Kostine into his own draft to include the Russian point of view. Though the story of “Farewell” has been well-covered in certain history books, it is still not widely known.

“I thought I knew about the Cold War, but I’d never heard of these characters,” said Canet, who plays the French engineer. “The first time I read the script I was amazed by the humanity of the story. The story spoke to the historical subject, but it also spoke about the family, these men in all their complexity.”

The real-life Farewell was something of a covert Francophile, but his decision to pick such an unlikely contact for his extremely sensitive information that destroyed an entire spy network was perhaps predicated as much by security concerns as personal predilections.

“My opinion is he decided to work with French people not only because he loved French culture, which is true,” said Carion, “but also because in Moscow working with American people or English people was suicide. French people, nobody cared. So it was safe.”

For the American part of the triangle of information and espionage portrayed in the film, Carion cast veteran character actor Fred Ward as then- President Ronald Reagan. Willem Dafoe and David Soul appear briefly as American intelligence officials.

Carion was conceivably asking for trouble on set by casting the two lead roles in his film with two men who are respected directors in their own right. Canet’s 2006 thriller “Tell No One” proved to be a surprise foreign-language hit at the American box office, and Kusturica is one of only a handful of directors to twice win the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

“They never asked me any questions about the way I wanted to shoot the scenes, never,” said Carion of his two leads. In fact, Carion recalled a specific conversation with Kusturica while he was dealing with the logistics of getting period-appropriate cars and costumes while shooting in the Ukraine. “He said, ‘I’m so happy not to be the director. I’ll be sitting over there; call me when you need me,’” said Carion.

“I think it took real confidence for Christian to have these two directors. We never had a reason to say, ‘Oh, what’s he doing now?’” recalled Canet, on the phone from Paris while taking a break from editing his next feature. “We were really focused on our characters.”

As actors, the two leads had a certain wariness of each other after first meeting. Canet learned passable Russian for his role and was highly prepared when it was time to start shooting. Kusturica spoke little French or Russian (the two actors spoke to each other in English) and he preferred a more spontaneous style of acting. Just like their characters in the film, the two actor-directors had to find a common ground over the course of their time together.

“That’s exactly what happened,” said Canet. “At the beginning, we didn’t get on very well, not talking to each other much, and after we started to get into the film we started to be closer. And that’s exactly as in the story.”

With “Farewell,” which was scheduled to open Friday, Carion has created a film that finds the unexpected personal connections amid explosive world events. By refocusing his story away from the world-changing episode that it underscores, zooming in on the personal pressures and domestic dramas, “Farewell” is something of a quiet thriller, a portrait of personalities amid paranoia.

“That’s what I really liked about the script, it was just about their lives and they seemed like totally normal guys,” said Canet. “My character is a real person, he existed, and he was just a guy working at a job who was not a spy and suddenly had so much pressure on him. It’s an incredible story, but told by normal people with normal lives.”

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