by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, Pierce Brosnan
Intro:
… a spy caper more interested in the fate of the heart than the fate of the world.
There are two kinds of Steven Soderbergh films. He’ll work within the confines of the studio system to deliver subversive material hidden underneath a sheen of Hollywood gloss, and then do his equivalent of Leg Day by pulling out his smartphone and making pure aesthetic art in the form of an AirDrop. With the latter, we had last month’s Presence (one of his better experimental works that deconstructs the audience’s own parasocial tendencies towards film), and now we have some more of the former with a sleek, moody spy thriller. Not that espionage is even remotely the point of the exercise, though.
Building on the overlap between clandestine spy work and relationship tensions found in films like Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Black Bag follows George (Michael Fassbender) as he tries to find a traitor within his own agency, with his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) being one of the potential suspects. Their respective histories with morally ambiguous character work makes them an ideal fit for this kind of thorny affair, but it’s their chemistry together that really sells it. George’s icy composure, that eventually melts into raw nerve endings, makes a fine pairing with Kathryn’s aloof bemusement at the inherently secretive nature of their shared work environment.
From there, as George goes from dinner party games to scintillating polygraph interrogations (shot and written like the prelude to a play agreement), the film’s dual fixations on secrecy and loyalty mainly uses hunting down some bit of computer code that could lead to nuclear war as foreplay for the more delicious entanglements between the characters. It operates much like Challengers, in its sexual tension radiating across the frame like heat waves, creating a film that doesn’t feature any sex scenes but still feels like it’s nothing but. When Clarissa (Marisa Abela) says how hot it is to hear George describe the things he would do for his wife, it’s difficult to argue.
David Koepp as a writer has been experiencing a second wind through his collaborations with Soderbergh, both on Presence and the twitchy COVID-set thriller Kimi. But here, he finds a groove in the exploration of relationship dynamics that have followed Soderbergh since his Sundance debut Sex, Lies and Videotape, imbuing every dialogue moment with equal parts caustic wit and tantalising allure. His playful approach reels out the intrigue that attracts audiences to stories about spies, while also gesturing that the same logic applies to the act of discovering more… intimate sides of a person. The softness behind the practiced presentation. The illicit thrill of doing what you know you’re not supposed to be doing. The casual coolness of admitting to things that might cause the unknowing sitting across the table to briefly choke on their overpriced drink. The understanding that knowing when to clench is a transferable skill.
There’s paranoia laced throughout, but lying underneath all that is something weirdly wholesome. It can be rough to weigh up the logistics of someone actually lying, cheating, stealing, even killing, for the person they love, but there’s still something affecting about the promise itself. That even amid so much chaos, so many intertwining tightropes with the end of Western civilisation (such as it is) lying in wait at the bottom of the drop, connection with other people still means something. It feels like a happy medium between the heart-on-sleeve bombast of Mission: Impossible, and the more down-to-earth empathising of John Le Carre, resulting in a spy caper more interested in the fate of the heart than the fate of the world.
Black Bag is a crisp business suit worn over a latex two-piece. It carries itself with style and finesse, polished to a mirror shine, while always staying true to its more adventurous ideas of fun and games. Its sly perspective on interpersonal intimacy not only lends itself to a story about the secrets we need to keep, but also builds on the ‘pleasure in acceptance’ model that Soderbergh has previously explored in films like The Girlfriend Experience and the Magic Mike trilogy. His safeword must be ‘boring’ because he still can’t be accused of it, and so he’ll just keep applying the riding crop to the Hollywood system. Godspeed.
