Black Bag

“This ends with someone in the boot of a car”

It was a nice spring night, the perfect day to spend with friends after finishing a difficult and exhausting project. A night so clear and warm that the possibility of staying home felt like an unforgivable waste. The last night before diving into the exam session. The rendezvous was at 21. After a 30-minute journey, I reached the designated place at the designated time. Nothing seemed suspicious. But then I felt a buzz in my pocket. I grabbed the phone and looked at it. A message appeared, soon covered by another one, and then another. In that moment, I felt exactly like Michael Fassbender, except for the looks, the charm, the money, the competences, the wife, the job, the career, the status of legend in the espionage field, the glasses, the roasted pork or whatever it was. I felt tricked, backstabbed, bamboozled. Betrayed. Even somewhat in danger.

The mission had been aborted. How did it happen? There was a rat in the group, for sure. A mole. A snitch. Maybe more than one. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I threw away the phone so not to be tra-trawhatthehellareyouinsane?!? gopickitupyoudementedbovine. Anyway, looking behind my back, I started rushing towards safe harbours. In an attempt to mislead those following me, I faked a move to the left and nonchalantly dropped inside the first open door I found. A cinema. Perfect, in the dark nobody could see me cry for being stood up once again at the last minute by the people I trusted the most. I bought a ticket and got into an empty room. I took a seat in the first row and sank into the chair as the lights faded away, leaving me alone and at the lowest of my strengths, to face Gerard Butler dancing once again with a Festina at his wrist. Weakened more than I could bear, the movie started, and I was teleported from a world of secrets, lies and deception into a world of secrets, lies and deception. I sighed, but there was no other place for me, no other identity to grab onto. 

Looking at Fassbender’s back for three long minutes, I found myself captured by the charm of a character whose robotic coldness reminded me of Fassbender’s David 8 (of course minus the sadism, the genocidal plans, and the fact of being an actual robot (So maybe he didn’t resemble him at all, but being a novice in this field I need to show my readers that I’m able to draw parallels from other pieces of cinema so to acquire credibility points (even though these parallels do not make sense at all (I’ll open another parenthesis just because I want to and there is nothing you can do about it)))).

“If she’s in trouble, even of her own making, I will do everything in my power to extricate her. No matter what that means. You understand?”

It was only the first of a series of psychologically traumatised characters that I would meet in the following 90 minutes, all of whom with their histories, their idiosyncrasies, their desires, their morals, their motivations, and their black bags. A group of people in which every person has secrets that they share with somebody else while hiding them from the rest. Everybody lies for their interests, everybody uses others for their advantage, and everybody is blind to how they are being used. Everybody has a fragment of the puzzle, yet nobody sees it in its entirety.

Michael Fassbender plays George Woodhouse, a secret agent who hates liars and who needs to understand who is lying to him. A secret agent who is tasked with finding the mole within the Intelligence. A secret agent whose suspicions are brought onto the person he trusts the most. Set on this very day, Black Bag is about choices and dilemmas, like the one faced by its protagonist: Would you betray your ideals for love? Would you betray your country for it? Your conscience? Your very essence? Would you kill for it? Would you lie?

A dinner, a little bit of truth serum, and you’ll be absorbed in a compelling spy thriller in which every individual is a cog in a bigger picture they cannot fully grasp. A puzzle that will be composed only at the very end, when Koepp and Soderbergh (here also cinematographer and editor, as usual) pull the strings with style, helped by a stellar cast ranging from Cate Blanchett to Naomie Harris, from Pierce Brosnan to Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack in George Miller’s Furiosa).

“When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?”

By Lorenzo Forzi