'I married an engineer, not James Bond," says the unhappy wife of a Frenchman living with their children in Moscow in the early 1980s. She is being lied to, betrayed, by her husband - but it's not the usual marital strife.
Froment, bright, bearded, bespectacled, has become a conduit between East and West, smuggling top-secret documents delivered by a senior KGB officer, Grigoriev. The Russian's files have the potential to upend the whole Cold War paradigm.
Farewell, a French spy film based on real events, is fascinating not only for its glimpse of the machinations of government espionage agencies in the Reagan era (Reagan shows up, played by Fred Ward, watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on his White House TV), but for the toll such subterfuge takes on the men, and women, involved.
