When I say that Steven Soderbergh’s perfect little cinematic contraption Black Bag is old-fashioned, I mean it only in the very best sort of way. Movies used to be like this, not that long ago but long enough that today’s young adults might not be aware of what they’ve been missing unless they haunt the deep catalogues of the streamers that the algorithms seem to bypass.
I’m talking about smart, sexy stories about grownup people, not the serious dramas but the sophisticated nonsense. Sleek and elegant, full of gorgeous, charismatic people with genuine star quality engaging in deliciously amusing balderdash. Movies like this used to be multiplex staples, and they’ve all but disappeared. It’s great we got this one, but it’s a bittersweet experience. “I haven’t had this much fun in years,” Cate Blanchett’s silky spy intones here… and it’s not difficult to hear it as a meta commentary from the actor, too. I certainly felt the same as an audience member.
It’s all wonderfully ridiculous spy-versus-spy stuff here — the title is espionage slang, the metaphorical place where the secrets are kept — as Michael Fassbender’s (X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Snowman) veteran MI6 agent is tasked with uncovering a traitor among his colleagues. Something about a macguffin called Severus that’s gone missing, a weapon with the potential to kill thousands if deployed. “There is a stranger in our house,” warns (former James Bond!) Pierce Brosnan (The King’s Daughter, Cinderella) as Fassbender’s superior… which might literally be true in Fassbender’s case: one of his suspects is his wife, a fellow operative played by Blanchett (Don’t Look Up, Mrs America).
The other suspects? They’re additional fellow operatives played by Tom Burke (The Libertine, The Young Visiters), Marisa Abela (Back to Black), Regé-Jean Page (Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Mortal Engines), and Naomie Harris (No Time to Die, Rampage), every single one of them just as slinky and slithery and splendid as the central pair. To open his investigation, Fassbender invites them all to a sneaky dinner party — he does the cooking, natch, because he is a thoroughly modern man — at the couple’s swanky Chelsea townhouse, where the evening includes psychological games right out in the open. (David Koepp’s [Inferno, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit] script is thrillingly clever.) The stage is set for what is to come: we can trust no one, we should doubt everything, and we must presume they are all playing one another. “Is it true no one can lie to you?” Abela’s satellite-recon expert asks Fassbender, whom we’ve been told is legendary as an agent. Because “we’re all fucking liars, professional ones,” she continues. Haha. The snark is succulent.
Where Black Bag goes with its espionage mind games is tense and tricksy, occasionally shocking, and sometimes hilarious. But the heart of the movie is Fassbender and Blanchett’s pas de deux as “the perfect couple” who exhibit “flagrant monogamy” — so say colleagues who know them, and the assessments seem wholly accurate. But their fierce devotion to each other comes with strings: He tells her he’d never lie to her… and then we witness him doing just that. She tells him she’d only lie to him if it was necessary… which, ironically, makes her more honest than him.
She does also lie to him. Their lies play like the most velvety sort of flirting. If a spy movie could have a screwball vibe, could be a little bit Thin Man, Black Bag it is.
more films like this:
• Duplicity [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Max US]
• Allied [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Paramount+ US]
And she played a monkey in “Pinocchio”!
I quite enjoyed this. My only gripe was not being able to understand a lot of the dialogue. I kind of want to see it again at home, with subs on.