Starring Emir Kusturica and Guillaume Canet. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 23, at the Ridge Theatre

The best French spy dramas tend to cleave close to the historical record. Thus, though Eric Rochant’s Les Patriotes might have been loosely modelled on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, its real frames of reference were the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and the Jonathan Pollard espionage case in Washington.

In a similar vein, Christian Carion’s Farewell (the final offering from the Vancouver French Film Festival), immerses itself in the early ’80s to an astonishing degree. Both Ronald Reagan (Fred Ward) and Franí§ois Mitterrand (Philippe Magnan) are major players in this drama, while one of the movers and shakers on the Russian side bears Mikhail Gorbachev’s unmistakable birthmark on his forehead.

The film describes the peculiar relationship that binds Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica) to Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet). The former is a high-ranking Soviet spook who seemingly can’t wait to pass on the Kremlin’s most jealously guarded secrets for little more than a book of poetry and a bottle of cognac. The latter is a French civilian working in Russia who can’t figure out how he got chosen for such a high-stakes game in the first place.

If the devil is in the details, Farewell must be considered diabolically clever. Carion shoots Moscow not like a city on the verge of collapse but like some post-Stalinist Disneyland, full of shiny white-marble monuments and wedding-cake skyscrapers. The acting is likewise brilliant, Kusturica, in particular, excelling in the role of someone who wants a future more subtle than any Cold Warrior is likely to provide (the actor-director’s own embattled political history giving him a lot to feed on, no doubt).

So eat your heart out, James Bond. Farewell is the real deal.