Artivels Undescribable Perfection

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

venkyhere The movie is class - none of the usual cliché-d gimmicks. The acting is not just good, its perfect. However, its the 'plot' which stands head and shoulders above anything and everything.Seeing a 7.0 rating, I wasn't expecting much, however, the light and shadow play used by the director when the two protagonists meet in the car for the first time, and the conversation they have; hooked me straight. This slow burner turned out to be the most realistic portrayal of cold-war era politics I have ever seen in movies. I know, I said politics, not espionage; because although the subject matter is espionage, the driving force is always politics. The director has hammered home his point without us even realizing it - like an expert nurse who knows how to use a syringe for kids' vaccination. Apart from a few Reagan scenes which are mildly cartoonish, I find this movie virtually flawless. Once again, I cannot fathom how this ended up with a rating of 7.0

ma-cortes Exciting film that was adapted from the book Bonjour Farewell: La Vérité Sur la Taupe Française KGB (1997) by Serguei Kostine with screenplay by the same director Christian Carion and Eric Raynaud . It deals with a naïve French engineer based in Moscow and a KGB analyst, Sergei Grigoriev, on the Soviet Union's clandestine program aimed at stealing technology from the West and disillusioned with the Soviet regime . He was assigned the code-name Farewell by the French intelligence service DST, which recruited him and delivering documents to a French nebbish in the diplomatic corps . He was known by that name throughout NATO's intelligence services. The French intelligence service alerts the U.S. about a Soviet spy operation during the height of the Cold War, which sets off an unfortunate chain of events.This interesting movie set during the Cold War packs suspense , thrills , tension, intrigue and familiar drama . The picture is an espionage thriller loosely based on actions of the high-ranking KGB official, Vladimir Vetrov . Good performances from main cast as Guillaume Canet as Pierre Froment ,Emir Kusturica as Sergei Gregoriev , Alexandra Maria Lara as Jessica Froment ; furthermore an excellent support cast as Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan , Niels Arestrup as Vallier , Willem Dafoe as Feeney , David Soul as Hutton and many cameos as Diane Kruger as Femme jogging , Benno Fürmann and Gary Lewis. Thrilling as well as sensitive musical score by Clint Mansell. Evocative and colorful cinematography by Walther van den Ende. The flick was well directed by Christian Carion who formerly made two good films such as ¨Happy Christmas¨ and ¨The girl from Paris¨ . The motion picture was well based on real events , these are the following : Vladimir Vetrov , in the film nicknamed Gregoriev , was born in 1932 and grew up within the Soviet system. After college, where he studied electronic engineering, he was enlisted in the KGB. He lived in France for five years, beginning in 1965 when posted there as a Line X officer working for the KGB's 'Directorate T', which specialized in obtaining advanced information about science and technology from western countries. While there, he befriended Jacques Prévost, an engineer working with Thomson-CSF. Vetrov returned to Moscow at the end of his posting. There, he rose through the ranks of Directorate T, eventually supervising the evaluation of the intelligence collected by Line X agents around the world, and passing key information to the relevant users inside the Soviet Union. Having become increasingly disillusioned with the Communist system, he decided to defect for purely ideological reasons . At the end of 1980, he contacted a Prévost and offered his services to the West. Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982, Vetrov gave the DST almost 4,000 secret documents, including the complete official list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world. Included was a breakdown of the Soviet espionage effort to collect scientific, industrial and technical information from the West to improve its own efforts. Members of the GRU, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and several other bodies all took part in such efforts. Vetrov also provided summaries on the goals, achievements, and unfilled objectives of the program. He identified nearly 100 leads to sources in 16 countries. In February 1982, after heavy drinking caused by a cooling-off period imposed by the French, who were fearful of his discovery through too much contact, Vetrov stabbed his mistress during an argument in his car . When a man knocked on the car window, Vetrov thought his spying had been discovered, so he stabbed and killed the man. He happened to be another KGB officer. Vetrov was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 12 years in jail in the fall of 1982. While in jail, Vetrov carelessly revealed in letters that he had been involved in "something big" before going to jail. The KGB eventually discovered that he was a double agent. As part of his confession, Vetrov wrote a blistering denunciation of the Soviet system, "The Confession of a Traitor". News of his subsequent execution reached France in March 1985. The information which Vetrov provided enabled the western countries to expel nearly 150 Soviet technology spies around the world; the French expelled 47 Soviet spies, most of whom were from Line X. This caused the collapse of the Soviet's information program at a time when it was particularly crucial. The U.S. created a massive operation to provide the Soviets with faulty data and sabotaged parts for certain technologies, as a consequence to the Farewell Dossier.

Andres Salama A good if a bit talky spy thriller from France that fictionalizes the real case of Vladimir Vetrov, a high ranking spy from the KGB who in the early 1980s and under the code name Farewell gave to the DST, the French internal security service, a massive dossier of files that showed how the Soviets were stealing massively Western technology. The French decided to pass the files to the United States, a convenient thing to do since the Reagan Administration was very suspicious of president François Mitterrand having several communist ministers in his cabinet (Fred Ward has a funny cameo in the movie as Ronald Reagan; Willem Dafoe appears as the CIA director).In the movie Vetrov is called Grigoriev and is played by the famous Serbian director Emir Kusturica. For dramatic reasons, the importance of these files is exaggerated in the movie; they are said to include all sort of things, even diplomatic codes which they did not and the dossier is somehow connected with the decision to announce the Star Wars weapons program. In the film, and since embassy personnel was under surveillance from the KGB, the DST decides to use as a contact with Grigoriev a French engineer working in Moscow for the Thomson firm (who is played by Guillaume Canet as a nervous Woody Allen type guy; Alexandra Maria Lara plays his wife who is obviously shocked when she learns her nerdy husband moonlights as a spy).Directed by Christian Carion, who made the very good World War I drama Joyeux Noel the film is especially fine in the reconstruction of the early 1980s and especially the Soviet Union at the time (Moscow is shown here as surprisingly sunny; if a movie based on this case have been made during the Cold War, Moscow would have looked surely much more gloomy and sinister). A good effort.

liberalgems This is a very empowering, true-story about one man, Sergei Gregoriev, who probably did more to bring down the Communist government in Russia - and end the cold war - than any other person who ever lived! This man should be honored by a postage stamp in every Western country in the world and in every high school history textbook! What an incredibly brave human being!I gained a lot of insights from watching this amazing film. The Russians lost an estimated 26 million people during World War 2. That's 1 in 3 people that died in all of World War 2 did so within the borders of the Soviet Union! I can only imagine the trauma and paranoia that was inflicted on the survivors who later then came to power. It didn't help either that a monster was at the head of government (Stalin) from 1924 to 1953. And, you wonder why the Soviets had a such a mind-boggling intelligence apparatus established throughout the United States? Once this network of spies was dismantled, the Soviet leadership was blind! Out of fear they bankrupted themselves on military spending because they could no longer accurately assess what actual threats the United States posed to them!Sergei Gregoriev, knew how his government would react to such a threat and he sacrificed everything to make it happen. I don't think he would be happy with the gangster capitalism that took Communism's place. But at least there are no more brutal wars fought in desperately poor countries, which have cost millions of lives because of the Cold War! Future generations will thank you for your sacrifice, Sergei Gregoriev!