Deception is as essential in cinema as it is in espionage. Watch the trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag — the explosion, the pulled gun, the tense glances — and you think you’re in for a wham-bam action thriller. In reality, this London-set spy drama is a coolly paced affair that luxuriates in its own cerebral suaveness. When its principal characters sit down to dinner early on, and taunt each other about secrets and deceit, it feels as if you’ve walked into an adaptation of a 1960s Iris Murdoch novel about clever upper-middle-class adulteries.
But confounding expectations is a trademark of Soderbergh, one of cinema’s most prolific and slippery operators. Black Bag opens with a sinuous extended take (once again, the director is his own cinematographer, under the name Peter Andrews) following British agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) in and out of an upmarket nightclub. He is warned of an impending menace, and of a traitor; on the list of suspects is George’s wife and colleague Kathryn St Jean (Cate Blanchett).
This initial burst of nightlife glamour is misleading. Much of the film plays out in the couple’s home, and at intelligence HQ, a corporate milieu of steel, glass and screens — glossier and more impersonal than John le Carré’s imperially dusty Circus, but just as morally squalid.
George, at least, seems impervious to corruption — he hates lies, and is peerless at teasing them out through sly psychological games. He is also a devoted husband — but what if Kathryn is deceiving him and the nation? David Koepp’s twisty script makes the stakes explicit: given the nature of the job, spies can only feasibly date other spies. But there are secrets that agents can’t tell each other, so the code word for discretion, “black bag”, is by nature unreliable: how to tell when an assignment is really an assignation?
Hence the brittle round of suspicions and recriminations among George and Kathryn’s dinner party guests: department head James (Regé-Jean Page), erratic operative Freddie (Tom Burke), tech expert Clarissa (Marisa Abela), and Zoe (Naomie Harris), the in-house psychologist who knows everyone’s secrets.
Among this crisply elegant cast, Pierce Brosnan’s presence as the group’s lofty, silver-maned boss suggests a Bond allusion — but the real homages are surely to le Carré and Len Deighton. Apart from making Fassbender oddly resemble a younger Bill Nighy, George’s heavy horn-rims — and his culinary skills — seem a nod to Michael Caine in 1965’s Deighton adaptation The Ipcress File.
Blanchett purrs through her role regally and enigmatically while Fassbender is tightly controlled, sometimes verging on mask-like blankness, as a quiet man constantly making razor’s-edge calculations.
Black Bag is beautifully acted, and carried off with supreme elegance — not to mention formal boldness, one sequence played out in tight close-ups and overlapping dialogue as George submits his colleagues to polygraph tests (another Soderbergh alter-ego, editor Mary Ann Bernard, does marvels). Yet in the end you can’t help feeling that the parlour game aspect of it all is a little too knowing — as if the film were wearing a hyper-polished cloak of sophistication to conceal its somewhat mechanical contrivance.
★★★☆☆
In UK and US cinemas from March 14
