"The Secret Agent" (2025)
Saw "The Secret Agent", "Cannes 2025's most-awarded film", last night. It is 161-minutes long (!) but it never drags. Set in Recife Brazil in 1977 it has the feel of films from the 1970s and includes "Jaws" in the plot and clips from "Omen". The filmmakers list dozens of influences, some which make sense -- 'Ikiru' 'Casablanca' 'Fargo'. And some of which don't make sense to me, for example "Close Encounters" has no similarity except that it is atmospheric and is of the period. Close Encounters, as we all know, was big budget Spielberg film that had government secrecy as a core element. 'Secret Agent' shows government corruption and dysfunction, very different.
IMDB: "In 1977, a technology expert flees from a mysterious past and returns to his hometown of Recife in search of peace. He soon realizes that the city is far from being the refuge he seeks.." But it is also about cultural memory as the son, in modern day, is shown to be disinterested in his father's struggles and murder during his early childhood but he remembers seeing the movie "Jaws".
It is layered as one of the hiding places for Armando is the projection booth of his father's movie theater. And they have intercut scenes of a researcher listening to audio tapes of the fleeing professor which evoke Coppola's forgotten film "The Conversation" (1974).
The politics didn't come across to me. I thought Armando was pursued the henchmen of a rich guy that he pissed off (true) but the film's materials insist that Armando is "a political refugee". I was a bit distracted by the Portuguese spoken throughout since it is close enough to Spanish to be unignorable to me yet not close enough for me to understand more than 40% of it.
Has a bit of everything I like -- dark humor, suspense, hommage to 1970s cinema, solid performances and an immersive landscape. There is thematic overlap with 'One Battle After Another' but that film is a post-modern mess where they let each actor pretend they are in a different film. 'Secret Agent' is OTOH well unified and focused. The suspense works because unlike the ADHD of One Battle, all of the characters in 'Secret Agent' inhabit the same world, with the same tone and you trust the storytelling enough to know that it will all pay off. 'Secret Agent' is closer to 'The Mastermind' -- another excellent film from 2025.
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I'll probably watch it on cable or streaming because I really need the subtitles when I watch a movie like that.
