One of the pleasures of cinemagoing in the March-April period is the sensation we're entering Hollywood's research-and-development lab, to observe those projects deemed too chancy for an awards season berth, yet not turbocharged or otherwise commercialised enough for the summer months. Say what you like about Mickey 17 - and I did - it was a gamble, and it's been followed into the multiplexes by Black Bag, the second film in two months (after January's Presence) from the ever-industrious, ever-experimentally minded Steven Soderbergh. Penned by the seasoned David Koepp, the new film folds in intelligence gained from such recent TV hits as Apple's Slow Horses and Prime's Mr. & Mrs. Smith reboot. It's equal parts spy thriller and romantic drama, parsing how international ideological conflict might be heightened and complicated by developments on the domestic front, yet with a characteristic perversity Soderbergh casts the two coldest performers of their generation in the lead roles, and - unexpectedly, miraculously - gets these icy slivers to strike genuine sparks. As with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the action centres on an odd, bespectacled cove called George, played here by the slippery, quasi-reptilian Michael Fassbender as a British intelligence officer apparently fused into his own black polo necks. (You wonder where he served his apprenticeship: the Left Bank?) We join him as he's assigned the task of ferreting out the suspected mole in his unit, a challenge made trickier by the fact his wife and fellow agent Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) is herself on the list of five suspects. His initial plan involves inviting this quintet round for a sitdown meal of daal laced with truth serum, at which point we note Soderbergh has cast film and TV faces schooled in doubletalk, innuendo and backstabbing: bearded elder Tom Burke involved in a tempestuous but not necessarily dangerous liaison with tech wonk Marisa Abela, shrink Naomie Harris (a sometime Moneypenny, no less) surely too worldly for cocky gamer swain Regé-Jean Page. George and Kathryn are meant to be the old hands in this context, a couple who've weathered countless storms together - but is she now cheating on him, and/or betraying her country? Given that the couple are keen cinemagoers - watchers by trade - and that a discarded ticket stub gets introduced as potentially damning evidence, Black Bag also poses a further, more self-reflexive question: can we trust an American movie this far into the 21st century?
Strap me to a polygraph - as George does several of his colleagues heading into the last reel - and my answer would still be yes, though the film's wider success may depend on your having the ambivert-neatfreak sweet spot that Soderbergh and Koepp are targeting here. Set beside the agreeably scuzzy Slow Horses, this is certainly a gentrified vision of the spy game, its harder yards gained not on park benches but at dinner parties in well-furnished rooms. (The suspense hinges on the fears of loners invited to enter into group social activity.) Already, there has been much online lusting over Kathryn's wardrobe; I'll confess my own head was turned by the tea lights that pop off the screen when these couples first sit down to eat. Mid-period Soderbergh delights in setting himself limitations - one location in Kimi and Presence, extended sitdowns here - but he knows how to tart these spaces up, to stoke visual pleasure. Clock the film's especially diffuse idea of lighting, which threatens at points to white-or-black out the screen like the foggable glass MI5 uses to shield meeting rooms from prying eyes. (Not seeing is the enemy of seeing.) These nifty games of control only bolster Koepp's script, which forces its characters into two-person tête-à-têtes designed to eke something out or get someone to show their cards. Soderbergh appears to have spent much of the last two decades watching even more TV than he's directed, and thinking about both what works there and what merits being restored to the bigger screen: the scenes in the therapist's office ensure Black Bag owes as much to HBO's In Treatment as it does to, say, The Ipcress File. What he's pulled into shape here is a limber, double-jointed hybrid entertainment: a movie that feels as involved and detailed as any spinoff, or as if it could inspire a spinoff, but which crucially doesn't require you to have sat through ten hours of preamble, and - even more crucially - wraps itself up inside 93 minutes, giving us all time to get home and pay the babysitter. Like its characters, Black Bag is spectacularly self-contained. Yet it speaks to an intriguing moment in pop culture, when after a decade-and-a-half of megabudget multiverse splurges, shows like The Pitt and Adolescence are demonstrating there may well be some back-to-basics virtue in resisting the call of the tech bros; in arming good directors with good scripts and good actors, allowing actors' faces to be read rather than obscuring them in vast clouds of pixels, and ditching the exposition in favour of suggestive silences and the mysteries of the human heart. There may be no more radical proposition made inside a multiplex in 2025: what if we went back to doing things the way we once did, in the days when our movies used to work?
Black Bag is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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