Director: Steven Soderbergh
Black Bag is a spy thriller starring Michael Fassbender, from the Agency (read my blog about the series here), and Cate Blanchett. The pair portrays a married couple, George and Kathryn, who work as secret service agents and are after a mole, suspecting that the mole might be one of them. Thus, the film also opens a question of loyalty: is marriage more important than the country? That also opens a further question on whether agents can be married and committed to others if they are to serve the country effectively; however, if the answer is no, then this opens a question of human rights. So, the chicken and the egg debate, which has existed since the beginning of the secret service programme, but that does not make this debate any less compelling.
Black Bag thus engages in a story of hunting the mole, and George is tasked with investigating who is leaking important security devices to the Russians. He and Kathryn host a dinner party for the suspects who secretly get fed a truth drug in chana masala, which opens a whole set of personal revelations and discoveries of true feelings towards one another. George finishes the evening with colleagues, wondering if Kathryn is the rat. This results in an investigation and George discovering what Kathryn does for the secret service, otherwise labelled as black bag, and it leads to a hunt for the mole.
The Guardian described the film perfectly, “So the action of Black Bag bops along with wry self-awareness from the office, to the various sleek city locations in which people take life-or-death calls on their mobiles, to George and Kathryn’s gorgeous London townhouse (is there family money there?) to their little country place where George drives around in a cap and a Land Rover and goes fishing. Fassbender, in his habitual slot-mouthed way, delivers lines of dialogue which are allusive, indirect, with the manner of drollery, but sometimes not as droll and revealing as they should have been…”
Thank you for reading!