Movies reviewed in brief

"Farewell," "Great Directors"

By ROB NELSON

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
August 5, 2010 at 7:44PM
Guillaume Cadet in "Farewell"
Guillaume Cadet in "Farewell" (Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

FAREWELL ★★ 1/2 out of four stars • Unrated by the MPAA. • Theater: Edina

Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica ("Underground") has acted in other people's movies before, but he's a revelation in "Farewell," Christian Carion's talky, fact-based, globetrotting espionage thriller set in 1981. Determined to thaw the Cold War even if it means torching the Soviet Bloc, Kusturica's sad-eyed Russian KGB agent, Col. Sergei Gregoriev, begins passing government secrets to a nerved-up and clumsy young French businessman named Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet, a filmmaker as well). As Gregoriev intended, the classified info reaches none other than Ronald Reagan (Fred Ward), whom Carion hilariously depicts as a dim disciple of old John Ford westerns.

"Farewell" has a highly regrettable habit of repeating itself over the course of two very long hours, but it certainly succeeds in making the political personal. Played as a wounded animal by Kusturica, Gregoriev seems to know his days are numbered, and Carion accentuates the tension with camera placements that subtly suggest there are eyes all around. Non-sequitur footage of Queen's Freddie Mercury onstage belting out "We Will Rock You" seems merely goofy until we remember that, like "Farewell," the song is really about how the West won. ROB NELSON

GREAT DIRECTORS ★ out of four stars

Unrated by the MPAA.

Theater: Lagoon

At the start of "Great Directors," her ridiculous documentary portrait of filmmakers who share only their consent to being interviewed, Angela Ismailos admits, "I wasn't exactly sure what it was I was hoping to discover." An excruciating 85 minutes later, Ismailos still isn't sure, and neither is her audience. Scattershot conversations with David Lynch, Agnès Varda, Bernardo Bertolucci, and seven other variably articulate auteurs are edited as if by Cuisinart in a bid to capture the elusive essence of cinematic creativity -- and/or to exploit these artists for their sizable fan bases.

Into Ismailos' aggravatingly random assemblage are tossed clips from dozens of great (or "great") movies, along with insufferably indulgent shots of the documentarian wandering city streets like some lost heroine from an Antonioni film. By the time great director Todd Haynes shrewdly name-drops "Chambre 666," Wim Wenders' infinitely spicier collection of filmmaker interviews from 1982, movie lovers of any persuasion will know enough to get their cinephilic fixes somewhere else.

ROB NELSON

about the writer

about the writer

ROB NELSON