Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett's 'Black Bag' Is Foreplay, Tease, and Fetish

It feels as if Steven Soderbergh spends a quarter of his sly and sleek and tremendously spiffy new spy thriller Black Bag either watching Cate Blanchett in the process of getting dressed or undressed, while somehow also revealing very little. That right there should tell you whether this is the movie for you or not—Black Bag is foreplay, tease, and fetish; it’s Blanchett slipping on thigh-high leather boots shot from the rightful worshipping stance down on the floor like the happy dirty dogs we are beneath her feet. It’s the arch in Michael Fassbender’s whippet back as he mounts her on their marital bed, fully clothed the both of them—obscene and oh so exquisite. Hang it in an art gallery and title it hot-to-trot—Black Bag is the heat.

Soderbergh is after all the man who borrowed one of the inexplicably sexiest scenes in all of cinema—the edited dissolution between the pre- and post-coital married couple played by Julie Christie & Donald Sutherland in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now—and made his own wondrous little aria out of it for his former scorcher Out of Sight; the man sure knows how to be horny when it’s called for! (Never forget this is an Oscar winner who also took the time to make a triumphantly goofy male stripper trilogy.)

But it’s been a little bit of a while since he’s made something this effortlessly rumble-our-tummies erotic—Black Bag reintroduces us to the movie-star enraptured Steve who surfed the surface pleasures of his Oceans trilogy; he’s come back to play in the sex lies and adult sandbox again. And by my count the time away tinkering with form (in experiments like Presence and Unsane) did the director some good—I might be biased given it stars two of my all-time favorite actors, but Black Bag leaves all the Oceans in the dirt.

Fassbender and Blanchett play George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, a Mr. and Mrs. Smith-esque pair of married spies who work for the same covert agency in London, but in different offices and roles. She’s out in the field doing the leg-work (hence those aforementioned boots and the constant costume changes) while he’s the ace at secrets and lies; at getting the truth out of people who make a living avoiding it. These are roles that work well in unison but which turn the other on its head when not, and Soderbergh squeezes enough juice out of our uncertain point of view on the couple’s possible marital tensions to power enough healthy breakfasts for ten lifetimes.

The spy film has always been a hot-bed of he-said she-said they-bedded and found out shenanigans—you don’t really need actual sex because the action is sex itself. (In that way, the only thing that would make this movie more Thin Man would be if George and Kathryn had a crime-sniffing wire-haired fox terrier on hand.) Domination, submission, games of trust and role-play—Black Bag (which is named after the metaphorical space where spies hide their secrets from one another) knows that the flip-flop of who’s on top is all it takes to make that biggest organ of them all (Fassbender… well, give or take) the human brain tingle. David Koepp’s script is a whip-smart tete-e-tete of wordplay, of what’s spoken and what’s not and what’s spoken but not true, with half a dozen smooth operators smoothing down the folds of their skirts and suit-pants as everybody’s legs get all tangled up together anyway.

Oh right—there are other people besides our hot main couple on hand! Truth be told, it’s a crackerjack cast, from dominant top to happily subservient bottom. Focusing in on a seemingly tight-knit group of spy friends, Soderbergh & Koepp brilliantly structure Black Bag as book-ended by two dinner parties, both held at George and Kathryn’s house. (And yes their house is as to-die-for as you might figure, since this is Soderbergh in aiming-for-pleasure mode—outfits and architecture and jawlines are all the stuff of wet dreams). The opening dinner is where we meet and get to know everyone—only under an immediate cloud of suspicion given that George has just told Kathryn he has reason to suspect a turncoat in their midst.

The guest-list consists of former Bridgerton star Regé-Jean Page and a handsomely bearded Tom Burke playing a pair of very differently coiled womanizers, Naomie Harris as everyone’s firm-appointed and secretly religious psychologist, and finally Marisa Abela (from Industry) as the nervous newbie on board, who’s really just happy to’ve been invited. Three pairs in total, all knotted up in ways we’ll spend the rest of the movie dissecting—where the final hammer of truth might fall we’ll have to wait for that second and final dinner scene, the one where the many tangles get torn asunder in a most auspicious fashion.

And such fashion! Such intrigue! Such glamour and fun! But not really like you’re picturing? Even with a former Moneypenny (Harris) and a former James Bond (Pierce Brosnan plays everybody’s boss) on hand, this is decidedly not a 007 picture—there’s the smallest hint of globe-hopping and a few whiffs of technological wizardry, but Soderbergh really reins in his focus tight as a fishing line, with almost all of the action remaining of the conversational sort.

In turn Koepp crafts his dialogue sharp as a shiv, as tender as a kiss to the base of the spine, with everything coming down to further excuses to keep digging deeper into the weird ways that George and Kathryn manage their work-life power-plays. In that way Black Bag kept reminding me of the metaphorical relationship drama at the heart of Phantom Thread—this is very much a movie about middle-aged making-it-work; about what it takes to keep a couple humming away many a year into it. And it sizzles as such. Black Bag is grown-up genre movie-making at its shimmering peak.