It’s a thorny question that has underpinned many espionage thrillers, including Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. Here, Victoria Luxford considers the cinematic secret agents who value their loved ones over their nation – and vice versa.
Steven Soderbergh blurs the lines between love and duty in his slick spy thriller Black Bag, which challenges the perception of secret agents on screen. These operatives are often presented as infallible figures precisely because they’re unattached, allowing them to save the world without endangering a significant other (who could easily be exploited as a bargaining chip). However, an interesting wrinkle emerges when matters of the heart intrude on missions. They split allegiances and have the potential to destroy our central character – and the world at large.
Such is the case in Black Bag. Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) and George (Michael Fassbender) are a married couple working for the same government agency. Despite being devoted to one another, they accept the rules of the industry and the secrets therein. This understanding is tested to its limit when George is asked to smoke out a mole with a deadly device – and Kathryn is the lead suspect. George remains loyal to his wife, which his colleagues find more problematic than noble. His attachment is seen as a professional shortcoming that puts the mission at risk. As the film goes on, the question remains: if she is the mole, can he be trusted to pull the trigger?
To most spies, emotion is just another weapon to use against targets (though it can, equally, be used against them). The world’s most famous secret agent, James Bond, has historically remained a self-sufficient bachelor. Bond girls rarely stick around for more than one film, with 1995’s GoldenEye perhaps summing up the life of MI6’s finest. When asked by Natalya (Izabella Scorupco) why he remains so cold, Pierce Brosnan’s 007 replies, ‘It’s what keeps me alive.’
By contrast, his successor Daniel Craig’s arc is defined by love. In his first outing, Casino Royale (2006), the idea of emotional connection is initially batted away during his meeting with Vesper (Eva Green), a treasury agent who is staking Bond in a poker game designed to trap Mads Mikkelsen’s villain Le Chiffre. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not my type,’ he sneers. ‘Smart?’ she asks. ‘Single,’ he says. Soon, however, feelings grow that test the spy’s battle-hardened emotional walls. Vesper’s trauma from experiencing the violence of Bond’s world leads to a surprisingly tender scene where he finds her curled up, fully clothed, on the floor of her hotel-room shower. Soft piano plays as the camera follows 007’s footsteps walking toward a crying Vesper. Bond lowers himself into the frame, soothing her by cleaning her hands that feel stained in imagined blood, and holding her for warmth. As the camera pans away, we see the pair embrace, our first glimpse of the tough secret agent healing instead of hurting, and a sign of their strengthening relationship.
Casino Royale (2006)
With Bond having won the poker game and escaped Le Chiffre, there’s a moment of confession between the pair that confirms their attachment. While recovering in hospital, they sit beside each other as Vesper confesses her love. When it isn’t immediately reciprocated, she says, dejectedly, ‘You’ve got your armour on.’ ‘I have no armour left,’ Bond replies, voice lowering to a vulnerable hum. ‘Whatever is left of me, whatever I am, I’m yours.’ There’s no romantic music here, just the sound of their words, as the camera comes in close on their faces as if to analyse each syllable. After hours of bravado at the poker table, the sequence is deliberately stripped back. We simply see their faces as they timidly reveal what’s in their hearts. Bond is right to be nervous. While touching, such defencelessness is detrimental for the secret agent, and this romantic horizon proves to be a mirage.
Casino Royale (2006)
It’s revealed that Vesper was working as a double agent, and her subsequent feelings compelled her to make a deal with the organisation behind Le Chiffre to save Bond’s life in exchange for hers. Initially seeing the secrecy as betrayal, Bond acts coldly about her on a call to M, leading his superior to conclude ‘you’ve learned your lesson’. In risking his heart, Bond is left with a grief that comes to define his time in the tuxedo. Vesper made him the man he is, and she casts a long shadow over the following films. Still mourning her, Craig’s Bond mixes love and duty once more – with Léa Seydoux’s psychiatrist Madeleine – as he sacrifices himself in his final film, No Time to Die (2021).
True Lies (1994)
In broader Hollywood comedies, the double life of an agent can be played for laughs. Arnold Schwarzenegger kept his world-saving antics from his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) in James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), with the laughs revolving around a woman discovering her dreary office-worker husband is really 007 with an Austrian accent. In Mrs & Mrs Smith (2005), Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a married couple who discover they are both undercover assassins for competing firms, with their marital struggles suddenly being worked out with machine guns. These lighter stories have happier endings, but the conflict remains the same: when the fate of the world is at stake, attachments can mark your downfall.
Lust, Caution (2007)
In Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), a drama far darker than most spy films, that maxim is taken to its ultimate end. Set against the backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, it stars Tang Wei as Wong Chia Chi, a woman recruited by the Chinese secret service to help overthrow the occupying Japanese forces and their puppet government. Her mission is to become the mistress of Mr Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a government figure in whom her superiors need to find a weakness. Genuine feelings begin to develop, but in a moment of doubt, superior Old Wu (Tou Chung-hua) angrily reminds her that an agent’s only loyalty is to her mission and country.
It’s Chia Chi’s loyalty to her heart that wins out in the film’s climax. Mr Yee takes her to a jewellery shop, with the undercover agent knowing many of her comrades are lining the street outside ready to assassinate him. It’s here that the ultimate decision is presented, appropriately enough in the form of a sparkling diamond ring he had made for her.
She hesitates to put it on, knowing what the gesture means. As Yee says ‘I just want to see it on your hand’, the camera moves close to her face, then down to her hand, with the absence of music underlining the importance of the moment. We look at the ring on her hand one last time as Yee holds it, a symbol of their future together that is about to be dashed.
Lust, Caution (2007)
In an intimate close-up, Chia Chi’s face is briefly obscured by the rim of her hat as she makes her decision. She whispers for him to leave, as we cut back to Yee’s face, crashing from tenderness to alarm. While she saves his life, she condemns her own, as her comrades are captured and Yee sentences them, and Chia Chi, to death.
In Lust, Caution’s final moments, Yee sits in darkness on Chia Chi’s bed, the light from the open door framing the pain on his face as the clock chimes 10, the time she will be executed. The dark solitude of this scene conveys the emptiness of those whose patriotism overrides their desires. Chia Chi defied duty for love, while Yee did the opposite. Both learned the bitter lesson that whatever action you take, mixing love with espionage is a losing game.
Whether experiencing the slick espionage of Black Bag and Casino Royale, or the shadowy rebellion of Lust, Caution, spies with romantic entanglements must invariably face consequences when their personal and professional lives collide. To be the ultimate government weapon, one must never fall in love, and there are many times when cinema has punished its heroes for breaking that rule.
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