Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
On second watch this goes up to #2 for the 2025. Would’ve been #1 had I not been sideswiped by the hypnotic ‘The Currents’ coinciding with my own existential quandary.
Feels Spielbergian (not just due to all those references to Jaws, although that certainly helps) but because it uses genre as a launch pad to mull over the ‘deeper questions’. I walked out feeling a bit shortchanged the first time. I thought I signed up for a thriller only to find something too meandering. But of all the best picture nominations, this is the only movie that has been gnawing at me.
The title card at the beginning reads, ‘a period of great mischief’ the word mischief clearly a coping mechanism. And it’s funny that just up until the final act all signs of public office corruption are played off for laughs: a corpse with its head tented underneath a newspaper, cops out to leach even if it’s just the last couple cigarettes, a carnival with a rising death count and the chief of police betting on there being more. Evil is not just ambient it is ‘part of the culture’. Not that everyone loves it, but everyone understands their way around it (Elza’s comment on how we do it the Brazilian way (jugaad)), until they don’t.
Filho seems less interested in a simple period or genre fare and instead opts to make this a good hang first. From the music to the casting to the sets everything feels imperfect in a lived in sorta way. Even if the dialogue writing is pointed, there’s something loose, relaxed about the way it is delivered. The camera lingers on every face long enough for us to commit them to memory. And it’s not just Moura’s and his fellow refugees’*. Filho’s camera equally cares for the father son contract killers and the chief of police and his two sons. Everyone’s found family here.
The focal point of it all is memory and how we perform it. Collectively, personally. Whether through stories or in harbouring a desire for vengeance, justice. And embroiled within all this is a reliance on evidence. What good is memory without evidence? Memory is fungible thing after all. No wonder every totalitarian state is built upon a destruction of personal histories.
And woven into this main story are two others: the first is the historian — a professional remember-er if you will — through whose vantage point the whole primary plot is a painstaking reconstruction. Second, a darkly comic surreal horror which is the only way oppressor violence can be encoded, retold and thus remembered sans its caustic side effects.
Funny that in the end there’s no real evidence of Armando’s mother. By the end even Armando is nothing but a projection of a historian’s hopes and son’s fantasy. But memories must count for something. All the blindspots and redactions convey as much of a truth as they hide. And like it or not, we still remember and that would make us all secret agents.
It’s telling that in that last exchange we realise that what was once a cinema, a place of memories and images, has now become a place of healing.