Efficiency isn’t meant to feel this thrillingly erotic. But that’s how love goes in Black Bag, an ode to a poisonously compatible marriage between spies, in which lies are the daggers slipped under a lover’s pillow each night. Airtight efficiency is also precisely how Steven Soderbergh’s thriller operates. It starts the moment its plot kicks into gear and never looks back.
George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) weaves through a London club. He meets his colleague, who tells him there’s a mole in the agency. One of the suspects is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). And off we go! Black Bag, like Soderbergh’s previous effort (Presence, released just over a month ago), is scripted by David Koepp. If that last film, a lo-fi POV horror, offered the most pleasurable demonstrations of craft seen so far this year, then Black Bag cranks that pleasure up several notches.
It’s lean to the bone, moving swiftly into an extended dinner party sequence built like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if several of its participants had committed war crimes, only to circle back to the same location later on, as if it were a prowling leopard. Insults here are exquisite little bonbons – “a perversion of what a man should be” is rebutted with “you’re a diseased creature” – and the dramatic twists are unexpected, yet never overstretched.
Everyone’s a sociopath, from Tom Burke’s lecherously cantankerous Freddie Smalls to Marisa Abela’s Clarissa Dubose, who adds to her Industry character’s haughtiness a sexual kink for polygraph tests. Regé-Jean Page is the maliciously blasé, Call of Duty-obsessed Colonel James Stokes, and Pierce Brosnan’s top dog Arthur Stieglitz breezes through every scene with a Machiavellian cocked eyebrow. Naomie Harris’s on-site psychiatrist, Dr Zoe Vaughan, at first seems moderately well-balanced, but she, like everybody else, is compromised by the malevolent vehicle that is international espionage. The keys to tomorrow are in the hands of people who view the soul as the weakest part of the body.
Considering the crux of this film is built around what George calls “fun and games” (translation: “psychological torture”), the profound loathsomeness of these characters is precisely what draws us in. That, and their luxurious closets full of turtlenecks, suits, and soft leather, dreamt up by costume designer Ellen Mirojnick. Or the seductive twinkle of David Holmes’s score. Or Soderbergh’s way with the camera (as usual, he serves as both cinematographer and editor), which draws in just close enough that we might catch the tiniest bead of sweat forming on someone’s brow.
And while the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it’s really Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power. You get the sense that if Kathryn suddenly started barking orders, everyone in the audience would be powerless but to obey, a kind of presence that hasn’t been seen much since Katherine Hepburn (whom Blanchett once played to a tee in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator). Fassbender, when he delicately adjusts his glasses or cuffs, evokes the sly, chilled elegance of a Michael Caine or Dirk Bogarde, but with a sliver of vulnerability in the eyes that really begs the question of what exactly is going on in that head of his.
George is ribbed for his “flagrant monogamy” since no one can believe the couple have been able to maintain a functional relationship within the most dysfunctional of careers. In bed, they swear absolute loyalty, yet whisper the code word “black bag” to each other whenever a piece of information is officially out of bounds. Is that hypocrisy a delusion? Or part of an intricate set of rules they’ve become experts in? Is a good marriage built on honesty, or the mutual acceptance that lies are necessary? The answer – well, let’s say that’s “black bag” for now.
Dir: Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan. 15, 94 minutes
‘Black Bag’ is in cinemas 14 March
