The wholehearted embrace of international cinema – once largely consigned to its own separate category – has been one of the most encouraging developments at the Oscars in recent years. Since Parasite’s groundbreaking win back in 2020, almost every best picture line-up has seen at least one film in a language other than English compete for the top prize, and that’s the case again this year, with both Norwegian drama Sentimental Value and Brazilian film The Secret Agent in the mix.
The fourth narrative feature from writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho, the gripping, stylish, and at times endearingly offbeat film is built around a quietly staggering performance from Wagner Moura, who is quite rightly up for best actor. Moura plays Armando, a university professor with an initially unclear past on the run for reasons that are gradually and deftly unspooled over a luxurious 2 hour 40 minute run-time that never comes close to dragging.
From the tense opening sequence set at a petrol station – where a lone dead body lies ominously on the ground – to a riveting climatic chase scene with a memorable instrumental score, the film is dripping with atmosphere and local character. Crucially, Mendonça Filho manages to convey the terrors of the dictatorship and the insidious evils of a corrupt society while also expressing a clear affection for Recife of the time and its ordinary residents, a nostalgia that could earlier be glimpsed in his 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts.
This approach includes a number of dramatic detours that naysayers might argue saddles the film with a lack of focus, but in truth provides a freewheeling looseness that only adds to its transportive power. There’s an entire subplot dedicated to a recent shark attack that eventually leads to one of the film’s most eccentric touches: a fantastic B-movie inspired sequence starring a rampaging severed leg. Meanwhile, Mendonça Filho also includes a touching send off for the late German actor Udo Kier, who previously appeared in his surreal 2019 western Bacurau and has a striking cameo here.
View Green Video on the source websiteOne of those possibilities, which gives the film its main thematic thrust, is the vital significance of cinema as a tool of collective memory. Although set in the ‘70s, the film is inspired by Brazil’s more recent brush with fascism under the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, and it seeks to both honour the memory of the brave dissidents whose sacrifices in that earlier era have been scrubbed from the official record and to acknowledge that the only way of facing up to present and future troubles is to address the evils of the past. This aspect of the film is further driven home by a smart framing device that sees a modern day student learning about the activities of Moura's character through audio recordings and newspaper archives, building up to an affecting coda.
It’s the combination of these factors – the political and personal relevancy, the textured sense of time and place, the tremendous character work, the sheer thrilling cinematic verve of it all – that would make The Secret Agent such a deserving Oscar winner. It truly stands apart from the rest of the pack.
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