If you’re hosting a dinner for half a dozen British intelligence agents with the aim of ferreting out a mole, what should you cook?
For George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), who’s preparing for four colleagues, plus himself and his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), who, like him, is a high-level operative, it’s chana masala with a few drops of truth serum.
“Will there be any mess to clean up?” Kathryn asks her husband as they’re getting ready.
Photo: AP
“With any luck,” he responds.
So goes much of the crackling patter of Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s delicious marital drama cloaked as a sleek spy thriller. Lean and taut, the 93-minute Black Bag, in Taiwan theaters on April 30, is more a sizzling amuse-bouche than full-course meal, but it’s simmered to perfection.
George and Kathryn, as fellow agents at London’s National Cyber Security Center, don’t seemingly have what you might call a traditional marriage. Each has their own secret ops, leaving large swaths of their lives off limits to the other. When George asks where Kathryn is flying off to on Wednesday, she shrugs with a smile, “Black bag.”
Photo: AP
In the movie’s opening scene — a slinky tracking shot that trails George into and out of a nightclub — an agent named Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgard) gives him the assignment to track down the mole, with the added wrinkle that Kathryn can’t be dismissed as a possible suspect. A cyber-worm device called Severus that’s capable of hacking into nuclear facilities has gone missing. The fate of the world, as it so often is, is said to be at stake.
But, really, the state of George and Kathryn’s marriage is what interests us. Extreme though their situation is, their union is one that, like any couple, is built on trust and devotion, even if their professional lives demand the inverse. When George, lying on top of Kathryn tells her he’d do anything for her, she coos, “Would you kill?” It’s a fair-enough test to the bounds of wedded bliss, sure, but her second question matters even more. “Would you lie?”
Over that dinner — a scintillating set piece around a darkened dinner table inside their London town house — we can quickly gather just how much the truth means to George. He’s renown for his powers with a polygraph. As a youngster, he even brought down his own father, uncovering his affair.
Photo: AP
“I don’t like liars,” George says through clenched teeth.
They’re joined by Colonel James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page); the in-house psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris); the carousing spy Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke); and the newest NCSC recruit, cyber specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela). Both are paired off in clandestine relationships that quickly emerge, among other secrets. More than state secrets, infidelity dominates the conversation.
Fassbender’s spook is an agent of precision. He wears gleaming black-framed glasses. When only a few drops of sauce land on his cuff, he immediately withdraws to change his shirt. Hard as it would seem, Fassbender has found a character almost as dispassionate and monotone as his methodical assassin in David Fincher’s The Killer.
This time, though, he’s not a loner. Blanchett’s Kathryn is kept more at a remove from us. She’s mysterious and aloof — a femme fatale, maybe, we’re led to wonder. An “aroma of hostility” accompanies her, Zoe tells her in a psych evaluation. Is she the mole?
This is an insular film, taking place mainly in crisply composed interiors, aside from the lake George occasionally fishes for bass in. There, in a fitting encapsulation of a movie full of smooth surfaces with currents twisting underneath, the camera gently rests on the water’s surface.
Black Bag follows a run of agilely directed thrillers by Soderbergh made with screenwriter David Koepp (Presence, Kimi). They are both at the height of their almost-too-easy powers; the script, especially, is peppered with delectable dialogue. Their movie adopts the air of menace and suspicion of a John Le Carre novel, yet hinges on the sturdiness of its married couple, like a super spy version of Nick and Nora from The Thin Man or a more cerebral Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
All of the supporting players — while they make up a fine ensemble — are ultimately playthings in their game of love. In a casting coup, a former James Bond — Pierce Brosnan — drops in late in the film as Arthur Stheiglitz, the head of NCSC. In his handful of scenes, Brosnan is rageful and ferocious, chomping into both Ikizukuri (prepared live fish) and the scenery.
His presence both enlivens a movie already humming with the uber-cool chemistry of Blanchett and Fassbender while transforming Black Bag into a twisty rejoinder to that notoriously skirt-chasing spy. Here, Mr. Bond, is how sexy monogamy can be.
While directing a satellite to peer down upon his wife on some unknown mission in Europe, George explains their mystifying dynamic to Clarissa: “I watch her, and she watches me. If she gets into trouble, I will do everything in my power to extricate her.”
In her response, Clarissa speaks for everyone: “That’s so hot.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS