The Insider: Soderbergh signs a spying thriller removed and elegant (critic)

Pretext telling a story of infiltrated mole in the British secret services, the sex filmmaker, lies and video questions the couple and conjugality.

Do love and espionage go hand in hand? It is an old question like the spy cinema itself, or at least old as The chains of Hitchcock, and which runs throughout the history of the genre, of Mr and MRS SMITH At Legendary. She is at the heart of The Insiderthe new Steven Soderbergh, who has fun with the codes of Spy movie As he was having fun last month with those of the Haunted House Film in Presence – The two films were written by David Koepp, specialist for thirty years of playful and reflexive scriptwriting machinery, of Mission: Impossible has Panic Room.

There is no ghost in The Insiderbut nevertheless an undesirable “presence” to flush out within the British secret services: a mole, which has just sells to enemy a huge secretly very lethal state secret. George Woodhouse has a week to find this enemy from the inside-it is Michael Fassbender who plays this super-spy, with his now proverbial robotic detachment, rode thanks to his Android roles at Ridley Scott (Prometheus,, Alien: Covenant) and from killer-samourai at David Fincher (The Killer). But George, behind his icy appearances as a secret professional, has a little heart that beats very loudly for his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) – who is not only spy, but also on the list of suspects …

The Insider is therefore a film “countdown” (with the counting of the days of the week which appears on the screen), doubled by a kind ofThey were ten At Mi6, with Fassbender in investigator cooking one by one of the alleged guilty. Either, in addition to Blanchett, a troop of young shoots bringing together Regeh Page ( Bridgerton)Marisa Abela (Amy Winehouse in Back to black), Tom Burke (Orson Welles in Mank) and Naomie Harris (La Moneypenny of the Last James Bond). About 007, note that this British legends office is led by Pierce Brosnan, excellent, in a handful of scenes, in an intelligence, revisment and barely faded.

The scenario, it takes long to understand it, is a pretext – a pretext to draw parallels between spy life and conjugality, with its unspeakable little secrets, its double games, its sometimes necessary betrayals. For a hard relationship – like that of this Power couple Espionage embodied by Fassbender and Blanchett, who forces the admiration of his young colleagues, lost in their heart and ass stories-it may be admitted that certain parts of the other’s life remain in the “black bag” of the original title of the film-a term which designates these top secret missions which one can absolutely do not say, even on the pillow, even in the secret of a bedroom. It is Sex, (detector of) Lies and paranoids.

Soderbergh spins the metaphor with its usual taste for conciseness, its enjal elegance, its taste for chic and cold places (fricked clubs, impersonal open-space), the traditional sexy bo electro of the faithful David Holmes, building its suspense around hyper dense scenes in dialogues, rendered dynamic by the grace of a very musical montage (assured by its care). Climb the tension and constantly bounce the issues. There are desires here to play it Howard Hawks, a desire for comedy of remarriage and Friday ladybut where the humor would hold less from the explosive wacky than a kind of ironic distancing and homeless pliers-even in the scenes where Fassbender puts his turtleneck and his gentleman farmer cap to go fishing on a lake in the countryside, mentally ironing the list of suspects and seeing if it bites.

1:35 am later, the conclusion of the case may appear a little vain, not giving the film something other than the appearance of a brilliant and attractive style exercise. But the way to get to the right time is very pleasant.

The Insiderfrom Steven Soderbergh, with Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke… in theaters on March 12.