If you are organizing a dinner for half a dozen British intelligence agents with the aim of discovering a mole, what should cook?
For George Woodhouse.
“Will there be any disaster to clean?” Kathryn asks her husband while they are preparing.
“With luck,” he replies.
This is how much of the crunch of “Black Bag” Steven Soderbergh’s delicious matrimonial drama plugged in like an elegant spy thriller. Degado and tense, the “black bag” of 93 minutes is more a fun of fun than complete food, but is slowly heat.
George and Kathryn, like other agents of the National Cyber Security Center in London, apparently do not have what a traditional marriage could call. Each has their own secret operations, leaving great stripes of their lives outside the limits to the other. When George asks where Kathryn is flying on Wednesday, he shrugs with a smile, “black bag.”
In the film’s opening scene, a sneaky tracking that follows George inside and outside a nightclub, an agent named Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgard) gives him the task to track the mole, with the additional wrinkle that Kathryn cannot be discarded as possible suspect. A cybernetic worm device called Severus that is capable of hacking nuclear facilities has disappeared. It is said that the destiny of the world, as is usually, is at stake.
But, really, the state of George and Kathryn’s marriage is what interests us. Although their situation is extreme, its union is one that, like any couple, is based on trust and devotion, even if their professional lives require the inverse. When George, lying on Kathryn, tells her that she would do anything for her, she coos: “Would you kill?” It is a proof fair enough for the limits of the married said, but his second question is even more important. “Would you lie?”
During that dinner, a set of a dark dinner table inside his house in the city of London, we can quickly gather how much the truth means for George. He is recognized for his powers with a polygraph. When he was young, he even knocked down his own father, discovering his adventure. “I don’t like liars,” says George through tight teeth.
Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) joins; the internal psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris); the expensive Espía Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke); and the newest recruit of NCSC, the cybernetic specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela). Both are matched in clandestine relationships that arise quickly, among other secrets. More than state secrets, infidelity dominates conversation.
Fassbender’s Spook is a precision agent. Wearing bright black frames. When only a few drops of sauce land in your bracelet, you immediately retire to change your shirt. However difficult it seems, Fassbender has found an almost as dispassionate and monotonous character as his methodical murderer in “The murderer” of David Fincher.
This time, however, it is not a lonely. Blanchett Kathryn remains more in a retreat from us. She is mysterious and distant, a fatal woman, perhaps, leads us to amazement. A “hostility aroma” accompanies her, Zoe tells her in a psychological evaluation. Is she the mole?
This is an island film, which takes place mainly in compounds creaks, apart from the George Lake occasionally fishing for bass. There, in an adequate encapsulation of a film full of smooth surfaces with currents that twisted underneath, the camera rests gently on the surface of the water.
“Black Bag” follows a series of Thrillers directed in an agilized way of Soderbergh made with screenwriter David Koepp ( “Presence,” “Kimi”). Both are in the apogee of their powers almost too easy; The script, especially, is dotted with a delicious dialogue. His film adopts the air of the threat and the suspicion of a novel by John Le Carré, but it depends on the robustness of his married partner, as a super spy version of Nick and Nora of “The Thin Man” or a “Mr. Mr. more brain” AND Mrs. Smith. ”
All support players, while constituting an excellent set, are finally played in their love game. In a coup d’etat, a former James Bond, Pierce Brosnan, falls at the end of the film such as Arthur Stheiglitz, the head of NCSC. In his handful of scenes, Brosnan is furious and fierce, biting both in Ikizukuri (prepared live fish) and in the landscape.
Its presence encourages a film that is already humming with the super-cool chemistry by Blanchett and Fassbender while transforming “black bag” into a retreat into a retreat to that notoriously skirt spy. Here, Mr. Bond, is the sexy thing that can be monogamy.
While running a satellite to look at his wife in an unknown mission in Europe, George explains his disconcerting dynamics to Clarissa: “I see her and she looks at me. If she gets into trouble, I will do everything within my reach to get her. ”
In his answer, Clarissa speaks for all: “That is so hot.”
“Black Bag”, the launch of a focus of characteristics is qualified by the association of language films, including some sexual references and some violence. Execution time: 93 minutes. Three and a half stars of four.
