Black Bag

A close-up of lemon garnish, a bird’s eye view of marinated chicken in an oven, a rack focus shot on legs on a wine glass. Though this appears to be an ordinary dinner party to the naked eye, this is no ordinary group of people. Working for the SIS, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) has been given one week by his superior officer Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) to uncover the traitor who leaked Severus, a virus created by the agency which can disarm a nuclear reactor in minutes. He is given a list—four agents and curiously enough, his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett)—and one week to determine the Judas.

Looking at Soderbergh’s filmography, it is odd discovering just how insistent he is to be in control of his film’s look and feel. Though he has never left the reins of cinematographer for his narrative works since Erin Brockovich a quarter of a century ago nor the position of editor since Contagion, you certainly cannot perceive any staleness or repetition in the presentation of his works. Every warm light in Black Bag is faded in a way that feels digital yet innovative. The film begins with a oner that starts from the back of George’s head and moves through a club, whose astigmatic lights practically blind your vision of the foreground as the film misdirects you to its premise. Soderbergh routinely finds creative ways of presenting his thrillers, a genre predicated on the misdirection of leads and narrative plotlines. 

Soderbergh’s inventiveness arguably shines through in his choice of screenplays, an aspect of filmmaking where he has actually let go of the reins after Schizopolis, his most solipsistic and nihilistic work. The proclamation that his writing was not a strength of his has robbed us of many great works, no doubt, but it has in turn allowed for greater focus to be placed on the structuralist aspects of his work. Soderbergh has chosen to emphasize his style over his substance, instead seeking the latter with carefully selected screenwriters. David Koepp does excellent work in this taut screenplay, routinely bringing other aspects of Woodhouse and St. Jean’s lives to focus to avoid revealing his hand early, all while orchestrating the movement of the narrative with both obvious and subtle misdirections to anchor the story. Though overly convoluted at times, its reveal is bitingly tense and refreshingly satisfying. 

To best serve this mystery, Koepp chooses to focus on St. Jean as a person of interest and intrigue. However, this leaves Blanchett with little to do, as she exists more as an inscrutable façade than as a character. Nevertheless, she capitalises on the crumbs she’s given with the lip-curling deliveries of her lines and manages to be the star of the show. Another standout is Marisa Abela, who is a revelation as the coy and often clueless Clarissa surrounded by agents whose routines are predicated on the idea of give and take. In a fit of frustration, she cries about the difficulty of maintaining relationships in this line of work: “We can’t date out because they won’t understand, and we can’t date in because everyone’s a liar.”

Being an agent leads to a painfully contradictory personal life, as it requires an intense mental capacity to do the job and gives no outlet to vent one’s frustrations to—save for the provided therapists that one can never fully trust. The title, Black Bag, comes from the confidentiality that agents must uphold, even between intimate partners. “What’s the deal in Zurich?” Fassbender wonders in a scene; “Black Bag” is all the response he gets from Blanchett. The film posits that if intimate partners even have secrets between one another in a professional setting, how can their fidelity be trusted?  

It’s important to note that not everything works here. Sometimes the film gets overly confused with its end goal, and striking that balance between convoluted and complex is something that Koepp occasionally struggles with here. This results in an end scene that, while satisfying, takes a lot of processing to get there. The duplicitous nature of the film no doubt warrants its levels of complexity, but more breathing room between several narrative plot lines would have been more effective in its job. Still, Soderbergh’s most concentrated and concerted effort in years is sure to satisfy its viewers.

8/10