Producers: Casey Silver and Gregory Jacobs   Director: Steven Soderbergh   Screenplay: David Koepp   Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan, Gustaf Skarsgård, Kae Alexander, Orli Shuka and Daniel Dow   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: B+

The latest collaboration between Steven Soderbergh (who not only directs but serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews and as editor under the name Mary Ann Bernard) and writer David Koepp is a clever but basically inconsequential tale of skullduggery in the  British intelligence service.  It’s Le Carré Lite, but elegantly constructed and acted, as enjoyable as the popular “Knives Out” puzzlers.

The plot begins with imperturbable George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) being assigned by his superior Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) the task of uncovering the identity of a mole in the agency who’s stolen the operational plan of the story’s MacGuffin, Severus.  The device can be employed, we’ve eventually told, to set off a disastrous reaction in a nuclear plant. 

George is given the names of five suspects.  The first four are Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a boozer and womanizer irked over being passed over for promotion; Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), a ramrod-stiff military type; Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), a saucy data analyst; and Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), the agency’s resident therapist.  The fifth, Meacham explains apologetically, is Woodhouse’s own wife, coolly glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett).

George’s methods are simplified by the fact that the four outsiders are romantically involved, Freddie with Clarissa and Zoe with James.  So he invites them all over for dinner with him and Kathryn, loosening their tongues with some food additives to provide him with clues to follow.  He then spices things up with a nasty parlor game to encourage inadvertent revelations.

Beyond saying that his scheme works, it would be churlish to go into too much detail about what follows.  Suffice it to note that as events unfold there will be, in no particular order, a murder; a clandestine meeting with the emissary (Orli Shuka) of an ambitious Russian expatriate (Daniel Dow); a secret Swiss bank account with a substantial balance; a drone attack; secret surveillance of an agent via satellite; and the disposal of a body in a lake.  Not to mention a marathon run of polygraph tests, presented by director-editor Soderbergh in a cheekily insouciant montage.  And lurking behind everything is the agency’s supremely supercilious head Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan), who, in one simultaneously hilarious and upsetting scene, shows a predilection for lunching on Ikizukuri.

In everything that happens is an undercurrent of infidelity, whether it be in terms of treason to one’s country or faithlessness in personal relationships.  It’s revealed early on that Meacham, who instigates George’s search for the mole, is at odds with his wife Anna (Kae Alexander).  And when Freddie’s dalliances with other women confirm Clarissa’s suspicions, her reaction is one of the film’s major shocks.

But the chief marital question, of course, revolves around George and Kathryn.  Protocol requires them to keep professional secrets from one another—“black bag” is the shorthand all the agents use to refer to some part of the job they can’t divulge to anyone—and each of the spouses keeps things from one another over the course of the week George has been allotted for his investigation.  Is their frequently-expressed devotion a ruse?  Is Kathryn the traitor her husband will have to expose? 

All will be resolved by the close of this delicious if not terribly nutritious confection, stylishly appointed by production designer Philip Messina and costumer Ellen Mirojnick and given added verve by David Holmes’s jazz-inflected score.  The performances are spot-on, with Blanchett’s icily seductive, coyly suggestive Kathryn a perfect counterpoint to Fassbender’s George, penetratingly intense under his sly show of reserve.  (A story early on about his treatment of his own father is a jewel.)  All of the others encapsulate their characters’ personalities—Burke Freddie’s petulant defensiveness, Abela Clarissa’s impudent assertiveness, Page James’s rigorous self-confidence, and Harris Vaughan’s prim professional demeanor.  Brosnan, meanwhile, is enormously amusing as a James Bond type gone to seed.

Ultimately “Black Bag” is an exercise in gamesmanship, on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers and actors who have fashioned them with such finesse.  If in the end the game doesn’t prove to amount to much—there’s none of the dark introspection about spycraft that one finds in Le Carré—it’s certainly pleasurable to watch the twists and turns as they play out.      

Producers: Julien Graff and Thomas Hakim    Director: Payal Kapadia Screenplay: Payal Kapadia   Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Aziz Nedumangad, Tintumol Joseph and Anand Sami    Distributor: Sideshow/Janus Films

Grade: B+

Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature has a simple purity that’s an implicit rebuke to the overblown excesses of Bollywood, as well as the stereotypes about Indian society that even less ostentatious films usually traffic in.  “All We Imagine as Light” is extraordinary for its mixture of harsh realism and ethereal beauty in depicting both the experience of women in India’s modern cities and the religious sectarianism that pervades the society.

Kapadia’s script centers on Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), two nurses at a shabby hospital who share a cramped flat, along with a stray cat Anu rescues from the street, in Mumbai, a megacity whose crowded bustle is presented as a welter of light and shade, of bodies moving in disorganized clumps while the thoughts of some are heard in voiceover expressing their individual hopes and fears.  Prabha and Anu, who have come from Kerala in the south for work and are more comfortable speaking Malayalam than Hindi, deal as best they can with the stream of the afflicted women who congregate in the obstetrics ward seeking treatment, but know the limitations of what they can accomplish, even if they sometimes bend the rules a bit to help.

Though they inhabit a common workplace and home, the two are very different personalities, but both have serious relationship issues.  The more solemn, reserved Prabha is married, but her husband departed for Germany shortly after their arranged ceremony, and has been absent ever since.  When newcomer Dr. Manoj   (Azees Nedumangad) shows a gentle interest in her, even asking her to read a poem he’s written (clearly with her in mind), she feels compelled to deflect his attention.  And when a rice cooker arrives in the mail from Germany, without even a note attached, her emotions are rekindled; in an emotionally wrenching moment, she literally embraces the device, a poignant expression of her longing for an intimacy that seems permanently out of reach.

The younger Anu, by contrast, is free-spirited, and she’s secretly seeing a young man named Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).  Shanet (Tintumol Joseph), another nurse at the hospital, warns Prabha that rumors are already circulating about her “loose” roommate.   What neither knows is that Shiaz is Muslim, and the the couple have nowhere to spend time together except in the crowded streets.  Kapadia adds a note of humor to their predicament when Anu dresses in a burqa to visit Shiaz at home, only for his parents to return unexpectedly and ruin their plans.  Meanwhile Anu’s parents, oblivious of Shiaz’s existence, keep sending her news of eligible Hindu marriage prospects.

There’s another major character, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older widow working as a cook in the hospital.  Her troubles are legal: a powerful real estate firm is intent on tearing down the building where her apartment is located for a luxury development, and she’s lacking the documentation that could prove her right to the place.  Prabha tries to help her develop her case, but the system is obviously rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, and ultimately Parvaty decides to leave Mumbai and return to her hometown, a seaside village south of the city where she can resume a less stressful existence.  Prabha and Anu offer to help with her move, and wind up in a quiet, secluded place unlike the one they’ve become accustomed to.

There both women find fulfillment, but in very different ways.  Shiaz has followed them, and he and Anu embrace the opportunity to express their love physically in a nearby cave.  On the beach Prabha is called on to resuscitate a man (Anand Sami) who’s been brought in, drowned, from the sea.  The effort becomes a metaphysical experience as the man morphs into her husband and begs forgiveness for abandoning her.  In its aftermath Prabha, having overcome her sense of loss, invites Parvaty, Anu—and Shiaz as well—to sit with her on the beach, chatting as they’re all illuminated by the light of the setting—or is it a rising?–sun.             

Though Kapadia touches upon troubling realities in contemporary Indian society, particularly in terms of the treatment of women, she does so with grace rather than anger, with a light hand rather than a cudgel.  The contributions of production designers Yashasvi Sabharwal, Piyusha Chalke and Shamim Khan and of costumer Maxima Basu don’t romanticize the gritty background, but cinematographer Ranabir Das adds an occasional luminous touch, especially at the close, and composer Dhritiman Das heightens the sense of potential magic in grim surroundings with a score that mixes melancholy with upbeat notes.

Under Kapadia’s sure hand, the cast offer performances that are sensitive without showiness.  Kusruti unerringly captures the quiet pain Prabha endures under her surface serenity, while Prabha and Haroon embody the spirit of young love with infectious abandon.  Kadam encapsulates the gruff resignation of a woman who must try to make it on her own, while Nedumangad’s sad demeanor demonstrates that men are not free of the feeling of isolation either.  The unhurried pacing of Kapadia and editor Clément Pinteaux gives all of them the opportunity to deepen their characters, resulting in an overall tone that comes across as very specific yet somehow timeless.

“All We Imagine as Light”—a title that suggests the yearning of its characters for a sense of connection in an apparently unfeeling world—is a remarkable piece of cinematic poetry, touching on substantive issues in Indian society but doing so with subtlety rather than hectoring didacticism.