3 hours ago
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The months and years drag on with no new James Bond, no clear indication of how he is to be repurposed as IP. Into this vacuum has rushed a new generation of spy stories on streaming television: action-intelligence office procedurals such as Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal, Slow Horses and indeed The Agency, starring Michael Fassbender, remade from the French show Le Bureau Des Légendes. These are secret agent dramas that give us the violence and the tech, juxtaposing suspected treason and infidelity in the traditional way, but with a new kind of workaday realist sexiness, and more elaborately about showing up for work: much emphasis on ID badges of various security-clearance levels that beep on card readers and can be worn round your neck on lanyards.
Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp. It is very much part of Soderbergh’s auteur business model: another new movie shot with limber energy on digital – Soderbergh is as much an evangelist for digital as others are for celluloid – whose budget is perhaps largely taken up by fees for the stars whose prestige gets this into cinemas.
Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play George and Kathryn, a married couple who work together in the Secret Intelligence Service: there’s a very New Spy moment when George, for inscrutable reasons of his own, smuggles his own ID card into his wife’s bag over breakfast and then has to wear a temp card on a lanyard. Also: their overall boss, played by Pierce Brosnan, is nettled at the sight of George outside the office where he’s having an important meeting and with a remote, switches the glass pane to opaque frosting. George is tasked with discovering who has leaked to the Russians an important security device which is so old-fashioned and McGuffiny it has to be transported around in the analogue real world. So he and Kathryn host a dinner party for the suspects, who are to be covertly fed a truth drug in the chana masala which results in a bizarre outpouring of suspicious craziness from one and all: Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris), James (Regé-Jean Page) and the dishevelled Freddie (Tom Burke) – this last being the spy drama’s traditional blokily down-to-earth “other ranks” figure familiar from Roy Bland in Tinker Tailor or indeed Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses, a show whose novelty resided in part in making this persona the lead. But what if Kathryn, to whom George is so uxuriously devoted, is the rat?
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. Insofar as this slightly absurdist display can be taken seriously, its importance resides in George and Kathryn’s married love. If you can believe in that, or anyway find it an entertaining contrivance, then there is entertainment in Black Bag, whose title is slang for the place where secrets are kept, and where married people find the truth about their spouse is hidden.
