Black Bag

Unauthorised Item
In The Bagging Area

Black Bag
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 2025
Focus Features
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Steven Soderbergh retired from directing in 2013. Since then he’s directed another 11 movies plus assorted TV shows and one can’t help but think that he’s more prolific now than before he made that statement. In fact, this is the second cinema release to be written by David Koepp and directed by Soderbergh this year and it’s only March (the first being Presence, released at the end of January and reviewed here).

And, like the aforementioned Presence, his latest opus Black Bag is absolutely brilliant. A startling and intense, emotionally claustrophobic thriller which seems to be an homage to the best of the cold war spy movies of the 1960s. I’ll give a couple of the references as I run through this review. .

The always interesting Michael Fassbender plays British intelligence agent (that’s spy to you and me) George Woodhouse, which is surely not a coincidental first name as a reference to George Smiley in a number of John LeCarre’s famous books (not to mention a character appearing in a number of movie adaptations of them). He is married to Kathryn St. Jean, a similarly high ranking spy who is played by the always amazing Cate Blanchett. Both are playing very muffled versions of themselves here, as two very cautious denizens of the global spy network. Both relying on the spy term ‘black bag’ as an area of their work lives which are off limits to talk about in their marriage, due to authorisation levels and ‘need to know’ status.

After hearing that one of five in his organisation is a traitor putting a huge number of lives at risk, with his wife being one of that list, George invites all the names to a dinner party at his and Kathryn’s home, with a little spiking of some of the ingredients, to loosen tongues and behaviour (a choice which leads to some more than inflammatory behaviour between the guests). These guests are played by Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page and the always brilliant Naomie Harris.

As the seeds of suspicion grow, the emotionally aloof and icy George starts exploring the twists and turns of the plot which features a device which could kill untold millions of people, called Severus. This includes suspicion and shadow thrown onto the head of the department, played by Pierce Brosnan. Shenanigans ensue and lovers of non-Bond sixties spycraft movies of the mostly British variety will love this suspenseful and well written thriller.

Well directed too, with Soderbergh directing, shooting and editing (using his mother’s name as a pseudonym) an intriguing concoction of thriller and ‘will he or won’t he shoot first and ask questions later’ style tension, as George moves ever closer to the solution of the problem (once he’s figured out that at least two people have been set up, including himself).

And it’s a damn near perfect movie, it has to be said.

The pre-credits sequence, filmed in a number of locations in London in one take (or appearing to be at least but, I suspect, just well staged and rehearsed and done in one take, as George arrives at a location and wanders a few floors of a busy bar until being led out somewhere else) with the camera firmly following George from behind, with his face hidden for this sequence.

Then, as we go into the credits, we see another major influence of the film as George prepares the meal in a way reminiscent of Michael Caine’s breakout role of Harry Palmer in The IPCRESS File, the first of his three movies playing the nameless character from Len Deighton’s famous spy novels. George even wears the exact same type of NHS spectacles which were synonymous with the Harry Palmer personality throughout the entirety of this movie. Soderbergh just couldn’t resist wearing his influences on his celluloid-like sleeve here.

The actors are all incredible in this, with an actress I don’t know, Marisa Abela, being particularly stand out as a young recruit who is perhaps a little too sensitive for the brutal world of international espionage. And she plays perfectly in a film which is, to be fair, only using the genre trappings of the spy movie to explore the depths of deception, loyalty and trust inherent in relationships, especially those in the spy game where the ‘black bag’ manifestation can be seen as a fallback to cover a multitude of sins, such as hiding a sexual affair.

Indeed, this is further explored in a scene which crosscuts between multiple subjects in a polygraph test.* A sequence which has been done to death in so many movies by this point that it’s become a very obvious cliché but, luckily for the audience, is executed to perfection here and which even gives some of the characters a little more depth than they had before this scene.

The ruse of the ‘gun on the table’ game towards the end of the movie will not surprise many people in the audience as to the intent of such an item on an open table but in terms of the surface story revelations as to the identity of the traitor in the ranks, it may well come as a surprise. Just like an Italian giallo trying to remain inscrutable by throwing motives at every single member of the cast, the traitor in this one could be anyone... even George. So when the traitor is finally revealed, coupled with the fortification of one character deciding not to kill that person when they had the chance to earlier in the film, it is somewhat surprising but, by that point there’s not much at stake in terms of the ultimate identity of said treacherous individual. And the film has a nice little punchline in terms of the secretive personal motivations of other characters in the narrative.

So there you have it. Black Bag gives us a  brilliant set of performances in a well written and directed motion picture which includes a very nice score by David Holmes, sadly not available on a proper CD at time of writing. This one is a full-on recommendation from me, especially for those lovers of cold war thrillers from days gone by. 

*Fun fact: The original lie detector test was invented by Professor William Moulton Marston who created and wrote the Wonder Woman character for comics in the 1940s. It's also why she has a 'rope of truth'. For more information, see my review of Professor Marston And The Wonder Women right here.

Presence

Wrapped Attention

Presence
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 2024
Extension 765
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light suggestion of a spoiler.

I don’t know. You wait ages for a new Steven Soderbergh movie to come out and then two come along at once.

Now I find Soderbergh quite hit and miss as a director but he has done some excellent movies in the past. I was surprised, however, when I sat down in the cinema the other week, to find two back to back trailers advertising two new films directed by Soderbergh and also both written by David Koepp. Both looked, at the very least, pretty interesting. The second of the two, Black Bag, will presumably be upon me before I even know it but the first of these, Presence, was the one I was most looking forward to because it’s marketed, inevitably because of the vibe the camerawork gives off, as a horror movie.

Now Presence is not, technically,  a horror movie but it does have a strong supernatural content and although there is a certain lurking fear of the unknown as part and parcel of every shot of the picture, it’s ultimately more of a drama which happens to feature a ghost. And that ghost is… well it’s certainly someone but, for the majority of the film where the identity of said spirit is withheld, that ghost is you. The audience watching the movie. Because the Presence of the title is a point of view, roving camera representing the audience looking through the eyes of the ghost. And that’s every shot of the movie and those shots are composed of mostly long takes with lots of smooth, languorous, fluid camera movement.

The story of the film is about a family that moves into a house which, yeah, definitely has a spirit in it... lurking and waiting for this family (as it turns out, specifically this family) to buy the property and move in. The family consists of a mother, played by Lucy Liu, who has made a big mistake at work which could possibly get her in trouble. Then there’s the husband, played by Chris Sullivan, who is possibly involved with some kind of shady dealings which is hinted at (much to his regret). Then we have the two kids… the athletic, pain in the neck brother Tyler, played by Eddy Maday and his sister Chloe, played by Callina Liang, who has just lost her two friends from an unusual double drug overdose. And it’s the sister Chloe who is the main subject of the ghost’s attention, via the camera eye of the audience. Is the ghost in love with her? Is it the ghost of her dead best friend watching over her? Well, all I will say on that count is, the secret behind the death of the friend is actually very relevant to the drift of the story… just not in the way you may at first think.

And then Tyler’s new college friend, played by West Mulholland, comes into the picture and he also seems to have an interest in Chloe (much to the ghost’s outrage, expressed in one scene where he and Chloe are trying to have sex). And then there’s the character of a psychic, who eventually enters the picture once the family realise that there’s definitely something going on in the house… and she’s both the blessing and the curse of the film.

A blessing because she’s obviously there to lay a few ground rules about the nature of the ghost to the audience, so that there is a sense of understanding of what’s going on later… but also a curse because, once I’d gotten an angle on the… let’s call them temporal traits of the spirit in question… I was much less surprised by the ending. I figured the ghost could only be one person and, while I got the identity of the person slightly wrong… and only because I was expecting the writer to go the whole hog and pull off a complete ‘bootstrap paradox’ at the conclusion... I was pretty close in all the bits which are important to that ending. However, because the slight mistake I made on identity, I still got a kick out of the very last shot of the movie, where the ghost is revealed in a silver nitrate mirror, as made by the Victorians (and since it’s Soderbergh and Koepp, the other cinematic connotations of silver nitrate must also surely have been in the minds of the writer and director).

And the film is absolutely brilliant, as far as I’m concerned. My expectations were somewhat lowered by a review I’d heard and also some bad word of mouth on the film but, for me I think this is an early contender for one of the best movies of the year, to be honest. The cinematography is hypnotic and the real tension of the movie comes from various characters looking into the camera as they sense the ‘presence’ nearby. It’s nicely scored too and, due to the obvious format choices, certainly has a nice fly-on-the-wall, immersive feel to it. The actors were all great too, which helps a lot because the way they were written and performed (though I suspect there was maybe some improvisation going on too) means you really care about what happens to them (and something does happen to at least one of them, for sure).

So that’s me done with Presence and it’s a solid recommendation from me on this one. Bring on the Blu Ray.

Unsane

The Unsaneable
Frightless of Seeing

Unsane
2017 USA
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
UK cinema release print.

Warning: A slight spoiler in that I tell 
you what doesn’t happen at the end.

Okay... so here we have a new Soderbergh movie. I quite like Soderbergh, for the most part. Been following him off and on since he hit big with Sex, Lies and Videotape back in 1989 and I still think his great masterpiece was The Limey. However, he does do some stupid stuff on occasion... I’ve not seen his version of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, for example (although I am getting more curious about it as the years go by) but I honestly don’t know why anyone would think they could make a better film than the great Andre Tarkovsky’s ‘beyond brilliant’ adaptation of it. Still, whenever I can stop seeing red about that artistic choice, I have to admit that Soderbergh is one of the more interesting and chameleon like of modern Hollywood directors.

Unsane is somehow being touted as Soderbergh’s first horror movie and I’m really glad I didn’t know that before going to see it because, frankly, it would have made me angry as it’s in absolutely no way, shape or form a horror movie. People seem to have forgotten what the words ‘psychological thriller’ mean these days but that’s exactly what this is... with he emphasis on psychological.

Now, Unsane is a bit of a hard one for me to talk about because, on the one hand, it’s brilliantly put together by the director, has great performances by the likes of Claire Foy as main protagonist Valentine Sawyer and Amy Irving as her mum but... well... it’s a bit of a let down in some ways. It’s like the whole movie comes together so well but the writers forgot to create an engaging or noteworthy story.

The plot set up as it is, is of a woman who is being stalked long term by an unwanted suitor and who accidentally ends up voluntarily committing herself to a mental hospital, only to find her stalker has followed her and gotten a job there to be close to her. All the way through this I was pretty sure I knew what the end twist of the film was going to be. Even when I first saw the trailer I was convinced that Claire Foy was going to turn out to be the man she thinks is stalking her and that s/he was sitting in a sanatarium projecting his own fantasies onto his immediate reality. Well... one of the most positive things I can say about this movie is that this is not the twist that happens at the end of this film. Instead though... there is no twist. Which is a bit of a let down.

For the most part, everything you see in the film is pretty much to be taken at face value. The only slight sting in the tale, if you want to call it that, is a quick epilogue where the long term effects of the story content on the central character are shown. However, as it happens, that was one of my favourite moments in the film so, although the disappointment that there was no clever spin at the end of the film was palpable, it was tempered by the fact that I did quite like the closing moments because it was stylistically very close to the kind of mood I felt the director was trying to portray in the rest of the film.

And by that I mean that, even though this movie is firmly set in the present... with cell phones, modern TVs etc... the style of this movie is definitely projecting back about 45 years in the past.

The whole thing was shot on an iPhone but it doesn’t look like it has been and the actual framing on it seems closer to a 4:3 ratio than anything else (at least as they showed it at my cinema). However, the whole thing is cut together as if it’s a Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg movie... if they had been shooting something to go on North Canadian TV in the early 1970s. That’s the kind of vibe I’m guessing Soderbergh was after here and, therefore, it certainly made sense that he would cast someone like Amy Irving in a role here.

Since the film is set in a mental hospital and is filled with the kind of stereotypes you meet there, it makes sense that the director chose this ratio and he seems to be deliberately using a lot of close-ups of people in those frames because it helps give it a claustrophobic look to things. Walls and people crowd in and loom large on the giant screen in front of you and you often get a feeling that the rooms are closing in on you. It’s also a natural symptom of framing two or more people within the same small space so... like I said, the choice of aspect ratio made a lot of sense.

He also tends to add a lot of layers of depth to the shots. In addition to a lot of verticals, you often get set ups where information from other levels of the shot are also clamouring for attention... through a window behind the main action, for eample, or through a doorway off to the right somewhere. This kind of opens up the screen space in an unusual arrangement, rather than make use of a widescreen canvass and it serves him well in giving the film an unusual visual identity.

There’s also an especially nice sequence in the film where Sawyer is slipped a psychotropic drug which completely interferes with her head and Soderbergh presents this as a kind of double exposure POV shot of both her face and the back of her head as she runs around an empty room while the faces of the other inmates look on at her through a window. It’s nice stuff like this that keeps the movie alive and interesting to watch.

As is the writer’s tactic of withholding key information until later in the film...

At the start of the movie we are 'filled in' by Sawyer that she is being stalked and that she tends to see her antagonist everywhere. We even have an ‘almost’ sexual encounter with a random stranger to highlight the full effect of this unseen presence but nothing tangible is really given to the audience and so, when the character ‘accidentally’ has herself committed, there is a lot of uncertainty in the minds of the audience as to whether she does actually deserve to be in this institution or not. The director uses this vibe to coast through the first part of the movie before we are filled in, during a flashback sequence, on the identity and history of her stalker. At which point, in some ways, it becomes a much less interesting story arc, to be honest.

Ultimately, Unsane never fails to grab attention and the final shot perfectly sums up 1970s TV in a way... while still, almost blatantly recalling the last shot of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, to some extent. Then we get some end credits music playing while some extremely fast rolling titles are superimposed on the final shot of the film and the combination captures the mood wonderfully. However, as I said before, the ending is also a real let down when it comes to showing us something we haven’t seen before and it’s almost like the director was exceeding some kind of brief to seem somehow much duller than the time period films he was, in some sense, imitating. So, a good time at the cinema if you are into looking at the whole way the thing was put together but, in terms of an exciting storyline... no, it didn’t quite make it for this particular cinema goer I’m afraid. Probably not one I’d recommend.

Contagion

Bugs N’ Kisses

Contagion
2011 USA/United Arab Emirates
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Warner Brothers Blu Ray B 

Warning: Spoilers slowly mutating and spreading 
throughout this review as you read it.

Okay, so Contagion was a movie I really wanted to see when it came out in cinemas at the end of 2011 but I was already well into my 3-4 month Christmas preparations by then so I just couldn’t claw back any time to get out and see this one. I forgot about it after that, in all honesty, but when I saw a copy of the 2 disc Blu Ray/DVD edition in my local exchange shop going for a fiver, I finally remembered I’d wanted to see this one.

It’s interesting because, at the time it came out, I don’t remember this one being particularly marketed on the strength of the director and, considering it’s got a very big cast of ‘movie star’ actors like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslett, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliot Gould in it, it’s no wonder that the movie was kinda sold on its cast rather than any of the non-acting crew. In fact, because there are no credits at the start of the film, I managed to go all the way through the movie without knowing who directed it... although I did pick up right from the outset that the way this movie was shot was definitely something above average. I’d just assumed it was an old Hollywood director from the 60s and 70s come out of retirement to get that kind of ensemble piece going... but now that I know it’s Soderbergh and compare it to the last film I saw by him at the cinema, Side Effects (reviewed here), it all makes sense now.

Contagion is, for the most part, a quite impressive beast of a movie. It manages to look and feel epic in scope without really becoming too bloated by its own ambitions, although the second half of the movie did drag just a little in some places... but for the most part, especially in the first half, I was absolutely riveted.

Since I hadn’t known who the director was before I watched it, my main attraction for actually giving some time to this “virus movie” (yeah, it’s Outbreak without the monkey, but that’s okay) was actually Gwyneth Paltrow, who is an actress I seem to rate a lot higher than most people do. I rarely watch the kinds of films she’s in so I was looking forward to seeing what she was like in this one but, unfortunately, it turns out that she doesn’t make it through maybe even five minutes of the movie before dying from the virus she’s contracted on the day before the opening scene. There are some scenes with her later on in the movie where Soderbergh cleverly uses standard film footage and then freezes it at specific moments as a metaphor for the long distance security cam footage of this character that Kate Winslett’s character is reviewing simultaneous to this... but for the most part her quick death and the subsequent death of her son while Matt Damon is away having to deal with her dying in hospital, is merely used to make an opening point.

Matt Damon is not the main protagonist of this movie though... or, to put it another way... Matt Damon is one among many main protagonists throughout the film (as indicated by the actors playing them in the cast above) and as a result, no person stays as the focus of the film for very long. It’s also a film about the way characters can drop out of the narrative when you least want them too and it all meshes together to present an experience which is very much about a disease and the effects that disease has on every one (whether they have contracted the disease or not) and so, for instance, Kate Winslett’s World Health Organisation employee who is working for Lawrence Fishburne becomes this film’s Marion Crane character (Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho) as the story strands you are following with her character come to an end when she ends up being a customer in one of the big triage sites she has set up to deal with the onslaught of the virus. Her death works really well and, although you obviously have some warning of the end coming with her character, the slight shock value is not really deadened all that much by the inevitability of her situation.

However, in some scenes, this tactic about the film being about the effects of a disease rather than the people, backfires somewhat when the characters are maybe a little too fully explored than necessary (which is why I believe the second half of the movie loses it just a little) and while it’s very interesting and brilliant to explore just how Lawrence Fishburne’s character manages to get himself into trouble with the government just by showing a little empathy or the way in which Marion Cottilard’s character is kidnapped and used as a bargaining chip specifically because of her relationship with the World Health Organisation... or even how Jude Law’s unsympathetic (for the most part and dependent on your view of homeopathy and greed) blogger gets taken down by the CIA, I think we didn’t really need to have such closure on the ends of these mini stories because they detract from the “virus sweeping everyone along in its wake” kind of sensibility which a lot of the rest of the movie has in spades.

Actually, Lawrence Fishburne has to get an extra mention from me because he has been given some of the best lines (the dialogue is very 1970s “Hollywood crisp” in some sequences) and because his character is just so righteous and sympathetic that you would always want to be fighting in his corner. He is portrayed as a boss who actually does care about his workers and their personal physical and mental health as much as the jobs they need to carry out for him.

I said I knew right away that this movie had been directed by someone special. Well there’s at least two interesting things going on with this movie which I think I’ve got Soderbergh pegged on now. One is the way in which the colours go from very neutral to quite colourful (especially in the sequences with W.H.O workers in their more natural office environments, which are usually accompanied by some bright warm yellows and oranges) as opposed to the washed out greys and blues of the rest of the film and then switch back again from scene to scene. Even a bright green used to desaturate the feel of the shot at the start looks very drab because, as you probably know, green lighting usually kills off or neutralises flesh tones and this is used to give the usually glowing Gwyneth Paltrow a real visual sense of being someone who is feeling run down which, coupled with her excellent acting, works really well, of course.

The other great thing Soderbergh does is to have the camera lingering on little details in the shots... which is a tactic I’ve seen him use before to highlight certain details but which, in this movie, is used almost specifically to allow the audience to reflect on how something might be carrying the killer virus that is the main subject of the film. A folder left on a desk, for example, suddenly makes us think twice after the owner has walked off and we stay at the desk with a file. Or the way in which, instead of following Matt Damon and his daughter out of the hospital environment, our camera eye stays behind to linger and watch the door to the outside world slowly shutting, to make us think of the possible consequences of Matt Damon maybe being a carrier of the infection. That kind of thing is done at suitable intervals and it all raises this movie up and gives it a certain lift and entertainment value where another director might have made less of a point of it.

My only real complaint about the film, other than it trying to bring too much closure on certain scenes (the Stockholm Syndrome style reaction of Marion Cottilard towards the end after she has escaped and then goes back to warn her prior captors is something which stretched credibility just a little and which I could honestly have done without), is the score... which is quite wonderful in it’s own right as a score by Soderbergh regular Cliff Martinez but which seems to give us a little too much of a high in some scenes, where it deviates from it’s quiet, sinister tone into something more like techno dance in certain sequences. It’s a valid way of scoring the scenes in which it does this, I think,  but I kept asking myself if I should have been tapping my feet when everyone was fighting for their lives against a killer bug. It maybe works more appropriately in Italian giallo or horror movies than it did here but, still, it managed not to stretch things too far, maybe, and all in all it’s something I’d like to hear away from the movie if I get a chance. So that can’t be bad.

The ending scene was a slight disappointment, perhaps, only because you knew how this film was going to end from the first shot. The movie catalogues the number of days the virus has been active and we start the opening of the movie on Day Two and carry on from there... so it’s really not rocket science to figure out that with such an important moment remaining undisclosed, we will flash back to Day One for the finale and it certainly doesn’t play badly. Just might have been nice to be a little less predictable there, maybe.

So, anyway, my verdict for this movie is very much that it’s a film which is an impressive piece of screen art. It takes what is ostensibly a big name, Hollywood style cast and manages to pitch them against each other in the service of the story and main messages rather than use them as performances to just hang big movie moments on. This is a film which is put together as a creative and expressive piece, as much as a film like this could be, with the kinds of funding modern movies need and I was really pleased to have seen it. Definitely worth your time if you like big disaster movies or Soderbergh movies in general.

Side Effects

Kill Pill

Side Effects
USA 2013
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: This review has big spoilers right from the outset. It’s the only way I felt I could say something even remotely interesting about this film and so I would urge you, if you know absolutely nothing about this movie but are considering seeing it, to go into the movie totally blind and then maybe read my review after you’ve seen it. 

So I quite like Steven Soderbergh as a director... ever since I saw Sex, Lies and Videotape when it came out at the cinema, many years ago. He also made an absolute genius movie called The Limey, which is a bit of a cinematic masterpiece and I do generally like his stuff (I reviewed his film The Girlfriend Experience starring porn legend Sash Grey here) but, just so we’re clear, I will never forgive him for trying to remake Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which is like trying to remake Casablanca or Star Wars in terms of sheer audacity. Leave the classics alone!

Anyway, I went into Side Effects knowing absolutely nothing about the movie. I think I may have seen a trailer which was quite disjointed and, I think, didn’t really make clear the kind of movie it was... and I’m glad that was the case because about half way through the movie I realised my stupid suspicions about the main female protagonist were actually right and the movie turned into something completely different to the way it was being presented.

The film is very slow paced and well designed, as you would expect from this director. He chooses to use a mixture of different shooting styles and edit them all together very cleverly into something that works and builds a mood or “vibe” which then becomes what the film is about as much as any linear plotting... much the same, in some ways, as Danny Boyle often does these days (see my review of Boyle’s latest, Trance, here) but not going for the high energy in-your-face kind of montages that Boyle does.

Starting off with what is, in fact, a crime scene... we see pools of drying blood on the floor of an apartment and then the film flashes back three months from this point. A point it catches up to about a third of the way through the movie (much earlier than I was expecting). Because the subject matter of the film focuses on a very depressed young woman who, when her husband gets out of prison for insider trading, tries to kill herself... Soderbergh manages to misdirect his audience quite skilfully with his usual modus operandi of “fly-on-the-wall” style recording of scenes into thinking that the bloody floors seen at the opening are connected to a successful suicide attempt by the young lady in question (played really well by Rooney Mara). But, as the film slowly winds on and we get to meet some of the other principle characters, like Jude law playing the young psychiatrist who takes on Rooney Mara’s character Emily as a patient, and Catherine Zeta Jones who plays her previous doctor, Victoria Siebert, we gradually find out that people we thought were minor players are actually main characters in an actual storyline (as opposed to just a series of observations on the nature of depression) and this starts to drum home as we see the person who everyone expects is the male lead, Channing Tatum as Emily’s husband, viciously stabbed by Emily while she is in a somnambulistic trance (in a sequence not quite as extreme but certainly not unlike the classic stab mayhem sequence which marks the first killing in Brian De Palma’s original version of Sisters). Although, by now, I’d begun to pick up on the trick of the way things were going to go I still heard the audience I was sitting in the cinema with on this gasp as this scene went down... so Soderbergh really played that one right, I reckon.

My suspicions were already up by now but the movie continues to play out for a while with this sequence just being another side effect of the new drugs Jude Law’s character has prescribed for Emily... but then things started to go the way I had suspected they might and the film turns into a proper thriller of a movie with a very long lineage which traces it back at least as far as 1940s American film noir and the likes of such movies as Double Indemnity and its many retreads.

Jude Law’s character, Dr. Jonathan Banks, has been made a patsy by two of the characters and as a result is ostracised by his community, loses most of his income and even loses his wife and child as more pressure is put on him. However, this is where things get interesting as the lone, obsessive figure everyone thinks he has become (which he has) fights back using the tools of his trade and starts to play off the two antagonists together, getting something a little too much more than justice and perhaps, when his final triumph comes, acting just as badly as the two villains of the piece.

I really can’t say much more about the movie in terms of plotting in case you are still reading this and are going to go see the movie... but what we have here is a brilliantly realised film which begins by approaching the material in a less direct and more observational, “untainted-by-any-emotional-or-judgemental-agenda” kind of way, and because the director makes this choice, the film really sucker punches you (even if you are, like I was, vaguely suspicious that there is more going on here than at first meets the eye) and kicks up the tension notch after notch until it gets you to the place you’re kind of, for the most part, hoping it will go. Most of the film you will probably be rooting for Jude Law’s character but he too, leaves a nasty aftertaste in the mouth at the end and ultimately this is one of those bleak noirs where you realise that, everyone to an extent, is a bad person.

Performances by the actors and actresses, as they always are in a Soderbergh movie, are excellent and this is also to be expected with such strong leads. I think I don’t speak falsely when I say that time will probably be very kind to this movie and I would expect it to be written about ad nauseum over the years and included as a key contribution on most major studies of the thriller/noir in film on most curriculums within the next ten or fifteen years. An unexpected delight and certainly worth the time of any cinephiles with a particular bent towards that kind of cinema.

The Girlfriend Experience

Fifty Shades Of Grey

The Girlfriend Experience
USA 2009
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Revolver Region 2

Yeah, okay. I apologise for the review title but everybody else is doing it and I saw the opportunity, okay? I want readers as much as the next blog!

When I first heard that notoriously extreme porn princess Sasha Grey was making a mainstream movie, my attention was immediately captured. My eyes further lit up when I heard she was making it with Steven Soderbergh at the helm, a director who actually knows how to put together a compelling movie... despite me still being angry at him for once sacrilegiously daring to remake something directed by the true poet of cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky. What was almost icing on the cake was that the movie was to be called The Girlfriend Experience, which is a service some escorts offer to their clientelle and which signifies a fake emotional shell of a relationship with the various escorting activities provided as part of the transaction. This sounded really intriguing.

And then it didn’t even come to my local cinema and somehow slipped in and out of the London cinemas, if it was even released at all in this country, without me even knowing about it. Which seems to be a current trend with most movies I really want to see these days and which really, to be honest, makes me angry with both film distributors and cinema chains over here.

And then, of course, I promptly forgot about it.

When I finally remembered about this movie the other day, three years after the fact, I leapt into action and "blind bought" a really cheap copy from Amazon. And that’s what happens when bloody distributors fail to make a film available at the cinema... you lose out on potential box office... the DVD was, by now, way cheaper than a cinema ticket would have been.

And so I watched it and got something both less and more than I was expecting.

I expected Sasha Grey to be absolutely brilliant in it, for example, and I was spot on with that prediction. She is. Really good at delivering what is probably a quite tough and naturalistic style of acting for a film which takes a fly on the wall kind of cinema verite as its main method of capturing the incidents which come to make up the overall picture of a small slice of an escorts life... the “action” of the movie takes place over a time period of less than a week. I expect a lot of the stuff in this film is improvised somewhat for certain scenes during rehearsals and kinda gone with or rejected as the cameras roll (although I’m just guessing here). Either way, as far as I’m concerned, Sasha Grey proves she’s a real lioness of an actress here and I hope she gets some more mainstream work as time wears on and is not ignored as all too often happens to people from her background genre.

On the other hand, I was expecting a movie with more plotting or resolution to it, at least in the dramatic sense... but that’s not quite what I got either. To say that The Girlfriend Experience is a drama is to both do it a disservice and to set up expectations in the viewer which the movie won’t live up to and I suspect, more importantly, aren’t supposed to fulfil. The Girlfriend Experience is less a drama and more of a lesson in transmitting and receiving information in a way which allows the human brain to appreciate what might seem obvious and undemanding at a level which allows the richness of the captured moment to shine and echo in your consciousness.

That is to say, the film is edited quite elliptically, more so than something like, say, Soderbergh’s The Limey and, as a consequence, you have to keep pausing in your mind to put what you know about who you think are the main players in this into some kind of linear order. I’m no stranger to this appproach to film-making, of course. Hey, I’m British! I was brought up on Nicolas Roeg movies, so the whole process of watching, what I shall quite obstinately label “the story”, develop all at once over the same time simultaneously, like an old Polaroid photo, is something I’m quite happy to embrace. Tarantino sometimes tries to use this approach but is more primitive, although still quite valid and spectacular in his approach to this kind of “narrative” device. Soderbergh chops his raw materials into smaller, easy to swallow, chunks and one might go as far to say that his show-and-tell approach to lifting the curtain on the process of data transmission approaches almost Godardian territory in its alienation of the viewer as part of a totally immersive experience. Then again, though, the work here is probably a lot more subtle than what Godard would have done in my preferred earlier phase of his career and once the style of The Girlfriend Experience is imprinted on the collective audience consciousness, the audience begins to adapt and get used to it and so will probably be less inclined to pop out of the movie the further into the running time they get.

The voice-over narrative by Sasha Grey takes the form of a list or inventory which details her transactions, the nature of her services for those transactions and the various consumer products like clothes and food which become part of those transactions. I think the joy in films like this is that they’re almost as much about what the viewer brings to them and sees in them as they are about any intent the film-makers have on wanting you to decode them in a certain way. So for me, her voice became the diary she keeps so she can tell exactly where she left off with each client... something I suspect an escort providing those specific kinds of emotionally enveloping experiences would need as an important aide memoire, I would expect.

Actually, it’s kind of an interesting contrast because, I would imagine, an escort has to make sure that for hereself, she has to emotionally distance hereself from her client as much as possible and the movie is put together in a way that reflects an emotionless lifestyle. All the sets the characters inhabit are very clean and tidy... almost clinical in their lack of individual character, it seemed to me. Sparse... not cheery. At the same time, the colours and lighting used to capture these cool worlds is quite colourful at times, each different colour scheme used just rubbing shoulders with the next sequence which is lit very simply and differently to the previous. At the same time the character's mindset may be reflected in the lighting in a linear path through the narrative, which isn’t how the movie is presented, and so this too may be worth unscrambling at some future point. The main protagonist, though, obviously has a strong emotional undercurrent and she gets upset and makes absolutely the wrong decision in at least one point in the movie. This is all very interesting and why I think, for me, this film may bear a couple of repeat viewings.

The Girlfriend Experience is, I should warn you, not going to be everybody’s cup o’ tea. You’ll probably get a lot more out of it the less you are expecting from it, so pull down any expectations you have of this one before giving it a spin is my advice. For instance, if you’re expecting Sasha Grey to pull her clothes off and give a similar performance to some of the stuff she got up to in her career in the porn industry (from which she has now retired and you can follow her here on Twitter if you want to see the kind of interesting projects she gets up to now) then you are going to be sorely dissapointed. There is no sex on show in this movie and maybe two to five seconds of dimly lit nudity, if that. This is a film which is more interested in exploring the practical, financial and emotional attitudes involved in these kinds of services and not a recording of the actual services themeselves. If you are cool with that and you also leave behind the expectation of a heavy, dramatic tension-release kind of “story telling” scenario, then you might want to pour yourself a glass of wine, lower the lights, put your feet up and let yourself be absorbed in this movie for a little while. You might find that the film begins to haunt you after it’s finished playing rather than hit you right off the bat. Allow your mind room to breathe with it after, for a week or two, and you might find you’ve possibly discovered a little gem.

Haywire

Haywired For Sound

Haywire 2012 USA/Ireland

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Ever so slight spoilers in

this one... not really spoilers as such.

Okay... so I’m always a bit undecided on Steven Soderbergh as a director. I remember seeing a programme covering the Cannes Film Festival which he won with Sex, Lies and Videotape and I also remember seeing the movie in question at the cinema a little while later and rating it highly (though it’s been years since I saw it). But for every Sex, Lies and Videotape he’s directed, he’s also made, what are for me, huge missteps in direction when it comes to film choices and many of his movies I’ve just plain refused to see.

For instance... if I want to see a Rat Pack film then I’ve got the original Ocean’s Eleven. Honestly, why would I want to see a remake of such when it doesn’t even feature Sammy Davis Jr dancing with trash can lids? Similarly, and perhaps more seriously... why in heck would you get it into your head to make an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris when, frankly, the 1972 version by “the poet of cinema” Andrei Tarkovsky is the definitive last word on what that movie could ever be. Seriously... Tarkovsky’s Solaris is one of the greatest pieces of cinematic art ever made... leave it the heck alone and certainly don’t make a movie where the running time is almost half the length of the original... Solaris is the last movie you’d want to whittle down in the edit. Might as well remake Star Wars or The Third Man.

The few films I have seen by Soderbergh... Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Limey and Full Frontal... were all pretty great movies, especially The Limey, which is a major motion picture event in its own right.

Which brings me neatly on to Haywire because it wasn’t until I saw the credits roll at the start that I realised that this one was written by the same writer, Lem Dobbs, who had done such a fantastic job with The Limey. Now, Haywire is a different kind of film, to be sure... but it’s still quite a cool experience and Soderbergh really comes into his own again on this one by showing what a great eye he has for the way the shots are framed. Even during the action sequences which are, to be fair, really all that the movie comprises of, the shot set ups are beautiful to look at and would not been nearly as arresting in the hands of some of the other directors who are competent with the visual language of the action thriller.

Haywire follows the character of Mallory, played by Gina Carano, a hitwoman/secret agent kind o’ gal who has been set up by her ex-lover and former employee (played by Ewan McGregor) to take the terminal fall for... I dunno, something political I guess. Mallory has other ideas of course and as she does her one woman Jason-Bourne-goes-for-payback-time act to get back at McGregor and find out who’s at the top of the chain, she encounters such established actors as Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender as she runs, jumps and shoots her way in and out of trouble.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this movie is that it is a big, dumb action movie. There are definite allusions to a deeper intelligence in the script which works hand-in-hand with the overall miasma of the cloak and dagger of the subject matter to give this movie the appearance of being something a little more smart than it actually is... but this certainly doesn’t posess the ice cold, hard nosed intelligence of Adam Hall’s Quiller novels, or even something slightly less challenging by John Le Carre or Len Deighton. But it does filter the atmosphere and dialogue hits of those kinds of books (and movies) to pull the wool over the audiences eyes in terms of the actual simplicity of the story and this is what helps lend credence to the movie as a more intelligent level of thriller... when really it’s actually no more intelligent than something like The Transporter or Taken.

Now I’m not knocking either of those films (love ‘em both) but this movie still seems to have a certain “spy chill” in its make-up and a lot of this chill comes from having actors who can speak these kinds of lines without investing them with too much emotion. Everyone is just a little bit understated and muffled in their characters and this plays rather nicely against the scenes where Gina Carano is fighting for her survival and clawing her way through the chain of people.

The first half of the movie follows a fight sequence where Mallory grabs a guy and his car and starts to tell him all the things that have been happening recently and detailing her betrayal to this “civilian” so that he can talk to the police. The second half of the movie catches us back up to the present and then becomes a race to the finish line as Mallory lays a trap in her fathers house (played by Bill Paxton in a role in which he is a nice kinda guy for once) and springs it near the end of the movie.

Respect, also, to Soderbergh for treating the musical score of the movie with the gravitas it deserved and actually let it effectively carry some of the load. The score by someone I’d not heard of called David Holmes is really deft and jazzy and Soderbergh turns the sound effects right down during most of the action scenes to allow the music to breathe on its own and do its job. This was a really good and positive decision and I wish more directors were doing stuff like this. In fact the sound design in this one was impressive all round. Nice work!

I do have to say though that, despite the allusions to a more intelligent plot line lurking at the edges of the scenes, the film is really quite predictable in a lot of places... especially the action sequences. For instance, the opening sequences set in a diner are not so smart as the film tries it’s best to convince you that it’s not about to leap into a glossy action fight... but you pretty much know when one of the characters orders a coffee, just what he’s going to do with it (although the over-the-top, make believe lack of consequence to these kinds of actions in these kinds of movies ensure that this is no homage Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, at least in terms of cause and effect reactions... this movie’s more about people punching things, it has to be said... and there’s nothing wrong with that). Similarly, there’s a scene where you know that two “work colleagues” are suddenly going to burst into action and try to kill each other as soon as they get into their hotel room and little things like this did kinda make me wish the movie had more, actual surprises in it.

However, this didn’t cramp the style of the film one bit and I can honestly say that this is one of the better American made spy thrillers I’ve seen in a while. Plenty of action coupled with some startling acting make this one an unmissable cinema attraction at the moment. Definitely a strong recommendation from me... and Soderbergh is definitely still a major player in todays changeable cinematic landscape, I would say. Take a walk to your local fleapit and check this one out.