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Politics Plague Carion’s Spy Drama |
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| 11/12/2009 |
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The Cold War may be over, but director Christian Carion came up against his own political intrigues while making his third feature film, Farewell, in competition at the Noir in Festival. Bosnian actor-director Emir Kusturica was not Carion’s first choice to play the part of Colonel Grigoriev, the real-life KGB agent who passed on invaluable government secrets to the West, via an unassuming engineer (Guillaume Canet) with no secret service training whatsoever.
Initially, the director chose Sergei Makovetsky, a popular Russian actor he met through Nikita Mikhalkov (who would eventually co-produce the project). However, six weeks before shooting began, Makovetsky received a call from the then Russian ambassador to France telling him he would lose his fans if he played a “cowardly traitor to his country.” Makovetsky immediately backed out of the project and, what’s more, Mihkailkov told Carion that the ambassador would soon become the Russian Minister of Culture so he could forget about any permits for shooting in public locations.
Carion says he realized then “there was no ‘new Russia,’ it was still exactly the same old Russia. And having lost my actor and the Russian locations, I also lost my dream. Then I thought, why not choose a Slavic actor who could speak Russian but wasn’t Russian? Kusturica came to mind. I gave him the screenplay and he called me at three a.m. the following day. He said he liked it and would do it because it was neither anti-Russian nor pro-American. So to this day I continue to thank the Minister of Culture because Emir is Farewell [the code name given to Grigoriev by the French secret service] – he’s extraordinary.”
Kusturica and Canet both put in strong performances in a film the director says is based partially on truth, partially on conjecture. “This is a film about point of view,” explained Carion. “While researching it I realized all the information was hearsay, because no one had actually recorded [Grigoriev’s] conversations, there are no photos even. I had a French version of events, a Russian version and a third, American version. I realized I could take what I liked from any or all of them, because the case will always remain a mystery.”
So much so that many sources with whom the director spoke pointed out that no one has actually ever seen Grigoriev’s dead body, only a statement of death that the KGB had given his wife. “I told these people, ‘If you’re telling me he’s not dead, that he ran away to Latin America to open a pizzeria, it could be possible.’ That’s the problem with the secret service: everything’s possible!”
The film has so far been released only in France though it has been picked up for Serbia, the US, Australia and Germany, with deals pending in various other countries. According to the aforementioned Minister of Culture, as long as he is alive, it will never be shown in
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