Film review

  • Black Bag

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Soderbergh (2025)

    In Steven Soderbergh’s latest, British intelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is assigned to investigate the leak of a top-secret software program – code-name Severus – and nail the person(s) responsible.  George suggests completing the job in two weeks but his superior, Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), warns that ‘If Severus is deployed as intended, thousands of innocent people will die’.  So one week, then.  Only five of George’s colleagues had access to Severus, including his wife and fellow spook Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).  The potential leakers are invited to dinner at the couple’s London home, where George cooks the food and presides over round-the-table mind games – all part of his strategy to discover who’s the traitor.  The four guests are also in relationships with each other, though not married ones:  agent Freddie (Tom Burke) and satellite imagery whiz Clarissa (Marisa Abela) are one item, psychologist Zoe (Naomie Harris) and senior agent James (Regé-Jean Page) another.  Uxorious George hadn’t for a moment thought Kathryn might be the guilty party:  he understood her inclusion on Meacham’s list was a mere technicality.  Once their dinner guests have left, however, George makes a chance discovery that leads him to suspect his wife.

    Black Bag‘s writer, David Koepp, has devised a plot that’s convoluted yet neat, and supplied a high-powered cast with plenty of sharp, show-off dialogue.  George and Kathryn trust each other implicitly but in their line of work they’re obliged to keep things to themselves:  ‘black bag’ is the response each gives whenever the other asks a question that can’t be answered without breaching confidentiality.  During one of George’s interrogations of Clarissa, she rails against the black bag mindset that encourages secret agents to dissimulate in their personal lives even when they’re not professionally bound to do so.  Clarissa angrily demands to know what kind of honesty there can be in a spy’s moral universe.  It’s a rhetorical question but one that matters in the story, and it prompts another question.  Black Bag is certainly clever, but how clever?

    George starts to doubt his wife after he finds a cinema ticket in a waste bin at their home; next morning, he suggests ‘a movie this week’ and names the one on the ticket; Kathryn’s happy to go see it even though, she says, she’s not heard of the movie.  It’s almost reassuring that, in Black Bag’s world of sophisticated obfuscation, characters are just as liable as in EastEnders to bin a guilty secret for another character easily to find.  Couldn’t the filmmakers think of anything better or are they amusing themselves by using such a cliché?  It’s no surprise when it transpires the binned ticket wasn’t carelessness on Kathryn’s part but a plant to deflect George into suspecting her.  But since George is super-smart, why would he suspect Kathryn rather than suspect a plant?  Whether or not Soderbergh and Koepp are having fun with this detail too, the name of the pretend movie – ‘Dark Windows’ – is surely an in-joke:  it’s a perfect summary of Black Bag’s visuals.  Most of the film takes place indoors, its palette dominated by inky blue-black and gunmetal grey; there’s usually a window in the background that looks out on a pale, colourless sky.

    Although Soderbergh and his cast clearly enjoyed themselves, the film’s air of smugness and the lead performances get in the way of making that enjoyment infectious for the audience.  Cate Blanchett, in a thin role that doesn’t begin to stretch her, so overdoes sexy inscrutability that she’s sometimes ridiculous – though is that too meant to be part of the fun?  When, late on, Kathryn and secret service boss Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan) are together in a lift and she leans across him to press the lift button, the movement is so extravagant that you feel Blanchett must be fooling around.  Yet she’s also careful throughout – even in the lift – to remind us that her every line reading, gesture or facial expression is proof of her acting skill.  Michael Fassbender is a very different problem.  He’s determined to deliver his dialogue with the minimum change of expression or tempo:  Fassbender is much more of an android here than he was playing a robot in Prometheus (2012).  The actor who was so exciting to watch in Hunger (2008), Jane Eyre (2011), Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) has vanished.  Tom Burke and Marisa Abela are more entertaining to watch:  their roles are skinny too but Burke’s wit and Abela’s vividness give proceedings a lift.  Although Pierce Brosnan is rather out of his depth in this company, that makes him more likeable – at least Brosnan seems a bit more human than either of the leads.

    Not that humanity is of interest to Soderbergh here.  It’s surely no coincidence that Black Bag‘s two most absorbing sequences depend on the technology of secret intelligence work:  when Clarissa, under George’s instructions, redirects a spy satellite to watch Kathryn meet with a Russian operative in Zurich; and when George subjects all four of Clarissa, Freddie, Zoe and James to a polygraph test.  The latter is especially deftly edited – by Soderbergh, under one of his usual aliases, Mary Ann Bernard.  (He’s also, again as usual, his own cinematographer, as Peter Andrews.)  I’m probably missing a level of irony or two, but I reckon the scene that really exposes Black Bag as less clever than it thinks is the short sequence in the cinema where George and Kathryn watch ‘Dark Shadows’.  The movie seems to be a chiller of sorts – but a fun chiller:  Kathryn cries out in alarm then giggles and scoops popcorn into her mouth.  Cate Blanchett and Steven Soderbergh mean to show us the often formidable Kathryn happily relaxing with her husband; what we actually see is Blanchett performing fear and pleasurable relief so emphatically that her character looks to be putting on an act.  This might make sense if Kathryn turned out to be the betrayer George worries that she might be.  Since she isn’t, why is she unconvincing as a person simply enjoying a movie?

    19 March 2025

  • The Great Ambition

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Berlinguer. La grande ambizione

    Andrea Segre (2024)

    An epigraph to this screen biography of the Italian politician Enrico Berlinguer (1922-84) confirms that it takes its title from words of Antonio Gramsci:  ‘Usually we see the struggle of small ambitions … against great ambition, which is inseparable from the collective good’.  (I suspect something has been lost in translation there … )  In the 1970s, Berlinguer brought the Italian Communist Party (PCI) closer to government than any PCI leader before or since.  Andrea Segre’s film, which begins in 1973, works its way through a series of major political events and Berlinguer’s involvement in them, including the 1974 Italian referendum on divorce, intervening general elections and the Red Brigade’s kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978.  Segre works into the narrative an impressive collection of news archive footage and Elio Germano gives a fine performance as Berlinguer but The Great Ambition is very limited, sometimes inert, as drama.

    Introducing his film at BFI, Andrea Segre offered a commercial justification for the way in which he chose to tell Berlinguer’s story: after opening last year’s Rome Film Festival (where Elio Germano won the Best Actor prize), The Great Ambition has fared well at the Italian box office, with encouraging numbers of younger viewers buying tickets.  Although Segre sees this as evidence that his historical film, as he intended, ‘speaks to’ the very different political world of the 2020s, I’m not sure it does, beyond occasionally illustrating that difference – as when, say, Berlinguer deplores rampant consumerism and politicians treating the electorate as idiots.  Politically far-sighted as he may have been, it’s doubtful that Berlinguer could have predicted how much worse things would get in those two respects over the next half-century.

    The film starts in 1973 for two main reasons. That year saw Berlinguer, as General Secretary of the PCI, launch his proposal for a ‘democratic alliance’ between his party and Italian Christian Democrats – or, at least, the strand of Christian Democracy represented by Aldo Moro.  The proposal reflected Berlinguer’s pragmatism in conjunction with his fundamental ambition to see a democratically-elected socialist government in Italy.  His chief inspiration in believing that ambition realistic was Salvador Allende, whose left-wing coalition, Unidad Popular, was voted in and governed Chile until Augusto Pinochet seized power in the military coup of September 1973.  (The Great Ambition opens with footage of the coup in Chile.)  Segre introduces Berlinguer during a visit that same autumn to Communist Bulgaria, where the country’s president, Todor Zhivkov (Svetoslav Dobrev), sharply takes issue with what he sees as Allende’s and Berlinguer’s compromise politics.  The Bulgarian episode is a prelude to Berlinguer’s 1974 visit to the Soviet Union; his meeting with Leonid Brezhnev (Nikolay Danchev); and the chilly reception of his speech to the annual party congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow.  In contrast, Berlinguer enjoys growing popularity at home and elsewhere in Western Europe.  The PCI’s increasing vote share in Italian parliamentary elections brings the party to the verge of government, or a stake in government, in the general election of 1976 and its aftermath.

    The Great Ambition, with a screenplay by Segre and Marco Pettenello, is very different from traditional biopics about politicians, where formative moments in the protagonist’s youth, key political and family relationships, and neatly dramatisable career highs and lows, tend to hold sway.  Yet the political detail supplied here doesn’t cut deeper than those biopic tropes.  Even though Elio Germano delivers Berlinguer’s speeches convincingly, it’s hard to see why Segre goes to the trouble of staging, for example, the Moscow congress and the delegates sitting on their hands, when he also includes an Italian TV news report of what has happened at the congress.  Information given about the political dramatis personae is oddly inconsistent.  In behind-closed-doors PCI meetings, Segre will sometimes put on the screen someone’s name without indicating their party position, thus seeming to assume a fair knowledge of Italian political history on the viewer’s part; several of these politicians appear just the once. Yet the party roles of Moro and Giulio Andreotti are explained in more detail – even though they’re surely the two most familiar names to audiences within and beyond Italy, and both men will make repeated appearances in the film.

    Thanks to the visual texture of DP Benoît Dervaux’s images, the transition from news film to dramatised narrative is often nearly seamless. Yet the prevailing quasi-documentary style also means that some of Segre’s more conventional staging – of election night results coming in thick and fast, of reactions to the news of Moro’s abduction – stick out as routinely theatrical.  Attenuated coverage of the hero’s home life pays some dividends.  Germano conveys with great economy, but nonetheless strongly, Berlinguer’s love for his wife Letizia (Elena Radonicich) and the couple’s four children (only Alice Airoldi, as the eldest of the three daughters, is credited on Wikipedia or IMDb).  The personal domestic details are refreshing and enjoyable partly because they’re rather few.  When the youngest daughter does a childish drawing of her father, she says it’s a picture of ‘a grey functionary’ – words she’s presumably heard describing him on the radio or TV.   Early on, Berlinguer tells Letizia that he put a fifty-thousand (?) lire note, for safe keeping, in one of their library’s many books; unfortunately, he can’t remember which book.  Much later on, a political debate with his two eldest children brings up the name of Rosa Luxemburg; Berlinguer remembers that he put the note – naturally enough – between pages of The Accumulation of Capital.

    We’re left wanting to know much more about Enrico Berlinguer, though.  Lean-and-hungry-looking Elio Germano does a great job of limning the man’s political strength of purpose and intelligence but Segre prefers showing behaviour to exploring character.  There’s a nice scene in which Berlinguer, in conversation with his eldest daughter, recalls – with feeling but without sentimentality – his mother’s death when he was a young teenager.  More typically, though, the film’s Berlinguer drinks milk, does gentle exercises and chain smokes:  the effect is tantalising – and frustrating because it’s clear the lead actor has the skill and invention to go further.  In the supporting cast, Roberto Citran stands out as the smoothly conciliatory Moro.  Paolo Pierobon, though more obvious as Andreotti, is entertaining (especially when, on a coffee-time visit to PCI offices to propose a political deal, Andreotti asks if he can take away the little sugar packets – it seems he collects these).

    A film-maker can’t easily predict what their audience – especially an international audience – will or won’t know about the film’s subject, historical or otherwise.  In this particular case, I must shamefully confess that I had a better advance knowledge of the divorce referendum than of contemporary elections in Italy because I remembered that Italian TV didn’t screen the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which took place during the referendum campaign:  it was feared the Italian entry, ‘Sì’, could be construed as propaganda for the (successful) ‘Yes’ campaign.  (Sung by Gigliola Cinquetti, who’d won Eurovision a decade earlier, ‘Sì’ finished second to ‘Waterloo’, by the way.)  Even so, Andrea Segre’s approach to the life and times of Enrico Berlinguer comes across as both self-limiting and confused.  BFI was screening The Great Ambition as the climax to its five-day ‘Cinema Made in Italy’ programme (a pity the film’s running time was advertised so inaccurately – as 95 minutes, when it’s actually 123).  The curator, Adrian Wootton, explained, to a nearly full NFT1, that the programme was designed to showcase Italian films which hadn’t yet received a wide international release.  That’s a worthy principle but I left feeling it’s hardly surprising that this film hasn’t yet seen the light of day in other British cinemas.

    16 March 2025

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