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25-05-2025
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‘The Secret Agent' Review: Wagner Moura Tries to Leave History Behind in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Beautifully Remembered Period Thriller
In his 2023 essay film 'Pictures of Ghosts,' a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife's once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that 'Fiction films are the best documentaries.' If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto. Born from the process of researching 'Pictures of Ghosts' (a fact that becomes rewardingly self-evident over the course of its 158-minute runtime), 'The Secret Agent' recreates 1977 Recife with even more vivid detail than Mendonça's documentary was able to restore his childhood vision of the city through archival video and photographs alone. Focused but sprawling, the director's first true period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the 'Brazilian Miracle' that marked the height of the country's military dictatorship, and yet all of those signifiers — along with most direct evidence of the military dictatorship itself — are sublimated into the movie's pervasive sense of mischief. More from IndieWire 'Militantropos' Review: Another Staggering Ukrainian Documentary About What War Actually Looks Like 'Fuori' Review: Valeria Golino Shines in Mario Martone's Tribute to Maverick Italian Writer Goliarda Sapienza That's the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film's opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here' than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson's 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' Of course, those movies both hinge on the tragic poignancy of their stolen pasts, and this one does too — but slowly, and with a much softer approach to the way that memory persists in spite of the gangsters who might work to erase it. Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that's easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife's São Luiz Cinema), 'The Secret Agent' only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. Mendonça's movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that's fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen. The film's story begins in media res, and while the plot couldn't be easier to follow, it fittingly requires the audience to earn every morsel of the context they'll need to appreciate its power. A middle-aged man who marries the quiet confidence of a cowboy with the 'I don't want any trouble, here' demeanor of an extra who just wants to survive the trigger-happy Western around him, Marcelo could be an anti-military Communist, but he could just as easily be a tech researcher who has personal business in Recife. That duality is at the heart of Wagner Moura's deceptively recessive lead performance — a performance that Mendonça mines for its errant sense of mystery from the movie's opening scene, in which Marcelo smooth talks a dirty cop at a highway gas station where a corpse has been rotting in the sun for several days. 'I'm almost getting used to this shit,' the station owner spits, alarmed at how fast he's adjusted to the reality of doing whatever business he can with a dog-eaten body lying next to the pump. Change comes fast in Mendonça's Brazil, and it's hard to blame people for doing their best to roll with the punches. Marcelo eventually arrives in Recife at the height of Carnival ('91 Dead!' the newspapers exclaim, with plenty more to come), where he moves into an apartment complex run by a feisty 77-year-old woman who shelters dissidents in need of a place to stay as they look for a way out of the country. The space also provides a home to the parents of Marcelo's late wife, and to the young son they shared before she died. It even comes with a covert job of sorts, though we learn very little about the specifics of the counterintelligence network that lands Marcelo a gig at the government office that mints government identification cards. (Certain vagaries are essential to this film about filling in the blanks, while others merely chip away at our understanding of what's at stake.) It's also the building whose archives might contain the only documented proof that his mother — disappeared from the Earth long before this story begins — ever existed in the first place, and Marcelo is determined to find it before he makes a break for the border. Alas, time will be of the essence here, as a bureaucrat who Marcelo crossed up north has dispatched a pair of contract killers to 'shoot a hole into his mouth.' And if they don't get him, Recife's shit-eating chief of police (Roberio Diogenes as Euclides) and his fascist deputies probably will, though he takes a shine to Marcelo that could prove useful in a pinch. Including Marcelo and his kid, all three of the film's rival factions are father-son teams, a choice that highlights Mendonça's gentle emphasis on the relationship between lineage and identity — and the defiant notion that history is as hard to erase as DNA. 'Can I see my blood?' someone asks while in the process of getting it drawn, a simple aside that captures so much of what Marcelo is hoping to accomplish in this story, to say nothing of what has motivated Mendonça, whose mother was a historian, to excavate the memories of his hometown in films like 'Neighboring Sounds' and 'Aquarius.' 'The Secret Agent' doesn't really tie a bow on that motif until the final minutes, which are set within one of the jarringly sterile flash-forwards that are littered across this story, but Mendonça tends to prefer crisp texture over clear point-scoring (as fans of his more fun and anarchic 'Bacurau' could attest), and this vibrant memory palace of a movie isn't in much of a hurry to get to its punchline. That's mostly to its benefit, as the movie — always compelling, but sometimes more sedate than its material demands — is often at its most alive during its detours. A scene featuring an agitated Udo Kier as a bullet-scarred Jewish tailor stands out for the contrast it draws between the permanence of scars and the mutability of the conclusions that people draw from them, while a loaded subplot about a disembodied leg evolves from a literary device to a full-blown Quentin Dupieux gag as Mendonça uses it to kick a hole into the fence between awful facts and urban legends. We also meet a cat with two heads, but I can't pretend to have a clear read on the meaning behind that just yet. The cat-and-mouse chase that's fueling the plot does boil over into a gnarly shootout (Mendonça's approach to gore continues to be a thing of beauty), but, to the potential disappointment of anyone hoping for another hit of that 'Bacurau' high, 'The Secret Agent' is consistently less interested in action than consequence, and less interested in scene than scenery. You can feel the filmmaker's dream-come-true ecstasy at being able to recreate the golden age of Recife's cinemas, which backdrop several key moments and tee up a recurring obsession with 'Jaws.' Ditto the joy he gets from rendering the city's streets in magnificent widescreen, and filling them with punch-buggies, bell-bottoms, and so many great Tropicália-accented songs that the critic sitting next to me spent the entire movie Shazam-ing every scene. I obviously stabbed him to death with my pen at a certain point, but I made sure to steal his phone for reference when the screening was over. That joy is contagious enough to feed into the bittersweet story Mendonça wrote as a conduit for it, and to deepen the ultimate impact of its argument that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With 'The Secret Agent,' Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up. 'The Secret Agent' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
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14-05-2025
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Brazilian Comeback: How The Cannes 2025 Country Of Honor Is Following The Success Of ‘I'm Still Here'
The scenes of celebration across Brazil in Carnival season when Walter Salles' I'm Still Here won the Best International Feature Film Oscar in March were akin to the country winning the World Cup. The excitement followed a post-pandemic record-breaking $35.6 million box office in Brazil for the drama starring Fernanda Torres as real-life figure Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens Paiva disappeared from their home in the early years of Brazil's 1964-85 military dictatorship. More from Deadline Scarlett Johansson On Why The Script For Her Directorial Debut 'Eleanor The Great' Made Her Cry: 'It's About Forgiveness' – Cannes Cover Story Neon's Palme D'Or Whisperer Tom Quinn Reveals Keys To Cannes And Oscar Success: 'I'm Happy To Share A Playbook' As Tom Cruise Brings 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' To Cannes, All Five Franchise Directors Look Back At The Wild Ride 'That explosion of joy in the middle of the Carnival, which is the peak of our popular culture and the best of Brazil, the best of our collective capacity to actually say who we are, was extraordinary,' says Salles. The victory came hot on the heels of the Berlinale Grand Jury Prize win for Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist Gabriel Mascaro's The Blue Trail, a dystopian drama about a 77-year-old retiree's life-changing journey through the Amazon rainforest. Three months later, Brazil is out in force at the Cannes Film Festival with the selection of Kleber Mendonça Filho's political thriller The Secret Agent starring Mauro Wagner in the main competition. It is also the Country of Honor at the Cannes Marché du Film, with a delegation of film professionals expected on the Croisette, led by Minister of Culture Margareth Menezes, who also happens to be the queen of Brazilian Afropop. Elsewhere on the Croisette, Marianna Brennand, whose female-driven drama Manas earned the Director's Award in Venice's parallel section Giornate degli Autori in 2024, is being feted with the Women in Motion Emerging Talent Award. 'It's not just a coincidence, it's an astral connection,' jokes André Sturm, founder and president of promotional body Cinema Do Brasil, on the market honor. 'We were first offered the honor by the market two years ago… We didn't know about the Walter Salles movie. We couldn't have imagined the success,' he explains. The acceptance of the offer was spurred rather by left-wing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's promise on his arrival in power in October 2022 to bolster the cultural sector. Aside from his ideological belief in the importance of culture, Lula also wants to make it a key part of the economy and job creation, particularly for younger generations. 'Audiovisual production is the strength of our cultural sector,' Menezes says. 'Despite political persecution and a lack of robust investment, the technical quality and talent of the sector's artistic community are undeniable.' Under this drive, $295 million has been earmarked for the film and TV sector to date. Lula's investment plans are astute. According to the national cinema agency Ancine, the audiovisual sector added $5 billion to GDP in 2023, and this figure is set to rise. The drive also makes Brazil an outlier in Latin America, where many other territories are slashing cultural budgets and censorship is on the rise. The most acute example is Argentina, where the far-right President Javier Milei has decimated the film sector. Brazil's cinema industry is recovering from its own brush with populism and authoritarianism under the 2019-2022 rule of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. During his time in power, which coincided with the pandemic, Bolsonaro disbanded the Ministry of Culture, cut cinema funding, and censored publicly funded projects. Menezes describes the federal government's $295 million investment as a 'rescue operation for the sector' following years of Bolsonaro's cuts. 'When we arrived, we found a wasteland of investments, a true chaos that was not easy to build,' the Minister says. Producer Tatiana Leite moved to France during Covid, 'exactly because of the lack of everything during the Bolsonaro government.' 'I could not work,' says the producer. She is now co-producing the latest feature from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour), which will be a big-budget historical drama set to shoot next year in Brazil, and developing projects from newcomers Pedro Pinho (The Nothing Factory) and Pedro Freire (Malu). Cinema do Brasil also lost most of its funding for four years but stayed afloat by piecing together financing from a variety of other sources. 'People understood the importance of what we do… after the pandemic, our booths at Cannes and Berlin looked like a Formula 1 driver's jersey. We had many different small supporters who helped us continue our work,' says Sturm. Veteran producer Rodrigo Teixeira suggests the Bolsonaro years were a blip in an otherwise upward trajectory for Brazilian cinema going back 25 years. 'It all really started when Central Station opened the Berlin Film Festival. From then until today, there have been a lot of great filmmakers, investment by the state, tax incentives, international partnerships, and people winning prizes outside of Brazil,' he says, who has half a dozen projects on the boil including Gabe Klinger's Isabel. 2019 was a bumper year for Brazilian cinema. Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho's Bacurau won the Cannes Jury Prize, while Karim Aïnouz's The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão clinched the Un Certain Regard award. At Venice, two Brazilian directors, Bárbara Paz and Ricardo Laganaro, won awards, and in San Sebastián, the Brazil-set drama Pacified, backed by Darren Aronofsky, won the top film prize. 'Bolsonaro in power combined with the pandemic killed the industry for two or three years, but we are lucky enough to have great projects, filmmakers, producers, crews, writers and stories, and we've started working again,' says Teixeira. It is too soon to assess whether Lula's audiovisual investments are bearing fruit. So far, the government has prioritized broad investments, like pushing cash into regions of the country that do not have a tradition of filmmaking. Only a portion is being used directly to fund or support projects that will ultimately land in the marketplace. 'It's a matter of public policy. But an important part of this money will arrive in the industry, so there is excitement,' Sturm says. There is currently an open call in the country for producers and filmmakers to submit projects for public funding, which has ignited a frenzy in the local industry. 'The last call attracted something like 1,200 applications for a national grant that will pick only a few projects, so it's very competitive,' Leite says. 'But at least we have this. Under Bolsonaro, we didn't have anything.' São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro remain Brazil's central hubs for film production. Salles' I'm Still Here was shot entirely in the latter, which Leonardo Edde, president of RioFilme, says reinforces the city's reputation as the 'birthplace of Brazilian cinema.' 'In 2024 alone, we registered nearly 9,000 shooting days, making us the most filmed city in Latin America,' Edde says. Lula has also spearheaded a decentralized approach to local production, opening autonomous film offices with their own funds in each of the country's 27 states. The Secret Agent, for example, is shot in the director's home city of Recife, capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, which is also home to a growing cinema scene. 'That is huge in a country with many realities like Brazil,' Liete says. Still, funding projects and supporting local infrastructure is only part of the equation. When these films are made, where will they find their audience? Leite argues that this is where the picture becomes less clear, suggesting that bottlenecks in the distribution chain are also holding local cinema up. 'One of the biggest fragilities of our cinema is that we don't have many independent distribution companies. We don't have any incentives for distribution companies either. They have to fight hard to still exist,' Leite says. 'For our population, we also don't have enough movie theaters.' As of last year, Ancine listed 3,510 operational cinema screens in Brazil. The country has a population of around 211 million. In comparison, the UK, with a population of around 68 million, has 4,587 screens. In the backdrop, there are also questions around the impact on independent producers and the box office of the global streamers, with two bills currently passing through the legislature that would increase tax contributions and introduce quotas on national productions. Menezes says streaming regulation is an imperative that her office is broaching with great care to protect workers' rights and the health of the local production environment. 'It is good for those who produce, for those who finance, and for those who consume. We don't want to tax anything; we want what is fair,' she says. In the meantime, local streamer Globoplay recently embraced a theatrical strategy for its first two feature originals, I'm Still Here and Andrucha Waddington and Breno Silveira's Vitória, giving them long cinema windows. Tatiana Costa, director of content for digital products at Globo, says the strategy was coordinated with all the parties on the film with the group promoting the theatrical release across all its platforms. 'We don't want to cannibalize the cinema and vice-versa,' she says. Commenting on the government's film and TV drive, Globoplay Originals head of drama Alex Medeiros says it goes beyond direct subsidies, noting how a raising of the cap on state money that can be spent on an individual production had also been a game changer. Teixeira also believes the global spotlight placed on Brazilian cinema by I'm Still Here will encourage more international investment. He is also predicting an uptick in non-Brazilian directors coming to the country to shoot, especially out of the U.S., in the current political climate. 'I was talking to an American filmmaker who told me it's impossible for independent filmmakers to do films in the U.S. right now, because the costs are too high, and the streamers are aligned with Donald Trump… There could be options for those filmmakers here in Brazil,' he suggests. Brazil does not currently offer a nationwide incentive, but there are a number of state- and city-based rebate schemes, notably those run by SPcine in São Paulo and RioFilme in Rio de Janeiro. In the backdrop to this positive wave, the spectre of Bolsonaro as well as that of the military junta captured in I'm Still Here remains in the air. While Bolsonaro failed to kill off Brazilian cinema, the former stopped the country's Cinema Nova in its tracks, leaving a void that would not be filled again until the 1990s and early '00s with films like Central Station and City of God. 'Continuity is at the core of what will ensue, but we're certainly living in a moment of vitality,' says Salles. Edde describes the current moment as 'a new era for the Brazilian audiovisual sector.' 'And more than just celebrating this moment,' he says. 'We are ready to turn it into concrete business opportunities and social and economic development.' 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