Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Deception is as essential in cinema as it is in espionage. Watch the trailer for Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Black Bag \u2014 the explosion, the pulled gun, the tense glances \u2014 and you think you\u2019re in for a wham-bam action thriller. In reality, this London-set spy drama is a coolly paced affair that luxuriates in its own cerebral suaveness. When its principal characters sit down to dinner early on, and taunt each other about secrets and deceit, it feels as if you\u2019ve walked into an adaptation of a 1960s Iris Murdoch novel about clever upper-middle-class adulteries.But confounding expectations is a trademark of Soderbergh, one of cinema\u2019s most prolific and slippery operators. Black Bag opens with a sinuous extended take (once again, the director is his own cinematographer, under the name Peter Andrews) following British agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) in and out of an upmarket nightclub. He is warned of an impending menace, and of a traitor; on the list of suspects is George\u2019s wife and colleague Kathryn St Jean (Cate Blanchett).This initial burst of nightlife glamour is misleading. Much of the film plays out in the couple\u2019s home, and at intelligence HQ, a corporate milieu of steel, glass and screens \u2014 glossier and more impersonal than John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s imperially dusty Circus, but just as morally squalid.George, at least, seems impervious to corruption \u2014 he hates lies, and is peerless at teasing them out through sly psychological games. He is also a devoted husband \u2014 but what if Kathryn is deceiving him and the nation? David Koepp\u2019s twisty script makes the stakes explicit: given the nature of the job, spies can only feasibly date other spies. But there are secrets that agents can\u2019t tell each other, so the code word for discretion, \u201cblack bag\u201d, is by nature unreliable: how to tell when an assignment is really an assignation?Hence the brittle round of suspicions and recriminations among George and Kathryn\u2019s dinner party guests: department head James (Reg\u00e9-Jean Page), erratic operative Freddie (Tom Burke), tech expert Clarissa (Marisa Abela), and Zoe (Naomie Harris), the in-house psychologist who knows everyone\u2019s secrets.Among this crisply elegant cast, Pierce Brosnan\u2019s presence as the group\u2019s lofty, silver-maned boss suggests a Bond allusion \u2014 but the real homages are surely to le Carr\u00e9 and Len Deighton. Apart from making Fassbender oddly resemble a younger Bill Nighy, George\u2019s heavy horn-rims \u2014 and his culinary skills \u2014 seem a nod to Michael Caine in 1965\u2019s Deighton adaptation The Ipcress File.Blanchett purrs through her role regally and enigmatically while Fassbender is tightly controlled, sometimes verging on mask-like blankness, as a quiet man constantly making razor\u2019s-edge calculations.Black Bag is beautifully acted, and carried off with supreme elegance \u2014 not to mention formal boldness, one sequence played out in tight close-ups and overlapping dialogue as George submits his colleagues to polygraph tests (another Soderbergh alter-ego, editor Mary Ann Bernard, does marvels). Yet in the end you can\u2019t help feeling that the parlour game aspect of it all is a little too knowing \u2014 as if the film were wearing a hyper-polished cloak of sophistication to conceal its somewhat mechanical contrivance.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606In UK and US cinemas from March 14<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Deception is as essential in cinema as it is in espionage. Watch the trailer for Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Black Bag \u2014 the explosion, the pulled gun, the tense<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":239094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-239093","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239095,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239093\/revisions\/239095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}