The Secret Agent (O agente secreto) is the latest film by Kleber Mendonça Filho, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival competition. When I wrote about this year’s selection, I lamented the parade of “the tired usual suspects”, including the Brazilian director. One of the factors that led me to that statement was that I was not a fan of Bacurau, which was included in the competition in 2019. The new film takes place in Brazil in 1977. Under the shadow of the military dictatorship, The Secret Agent tracks Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a fugitive technology expert, as he reaches Recife amid Carnival’s fervour, seeking to reconnect with his son and evade his pursuers and escape persecution.

The film throws us directly into the carnival. The colourful imagery and pulsing soundtrack immediately establish the tone, not only of celebration, but also of what might lie beneath. At one point, there is a dead body lying around that nobody seems to care about. According to the director, this comes from childhood memories, even though this specific scene is fictional. Especially during the carnival, the police might be too overworked to handle such issues. When we are completely immersed in the time and milieu, we are suddenly thrown into the present, with a flash forward, where we encounter two young female researchers going through cassette tapes from the era. The sensation is akin to waking up from a dream.

In The Disapproving Swede headquarters, the plot elements are not the most essential. However, it must be said that the director, who wrote the script himself, has outdone himself. The story is tightly plotted while still providing ample space to flesh out the era and the environment. The two timelines could have felt forced in lesser hands, but they work together both narratively and stylistically, blending espionage thriller, historical drama, and other quirky elements to spectacular effect. There was a time when one could regularly watch films of this calibre. The way Filho’s film is executed brings the spectator back not only to 1978 but also, meta-cinematically, to any era when films were visually stunning and thoroughly engrossing.

The style of The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent was shot digitally by Evgenia Alexandrova, using vintage camera equipment with Panavision anamorphic lenses to enhance the period authenticity and atmospheric feel. During the Cannes competition, which featured a surprisingly large number of films in the Academy ratio, it felt like a relief to see a perfectly lensed film in widescreen, more precisely 2.39:1. The editing by Eduardo Serrano and Matheus Farias is expertly conceived as well. I am generally not a fan of needle drops (I’m looking at you, Quentin and Marty), but again, The Secret Agent broke down my defenses. Both Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now and Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby (especially) work beautifully in this context.

Already in my initial reaction on the festival’s fifth day, I labelled the film the best of the festival, and there is no reason to walk back from that. I haven’t mentioned the production designer, Thales Junqueira, and the costume designer, Rita Azevedo, whose contributions are instrumental to the film’s ambience. Recife is the director’s hometown, and even though he was a child when the events in the movie took place, he is obviously familiar with the location. Cinemas play a significant part in the film, and one of the films that is being screened is Jaws. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you all the implications around the shark motive in one of the film’s legs.

The feeling for a place and an era can be compared to Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, which failed in every regard in that aspect, and never felt anything but artificial. Filho conducted years of research on the movie palaces of Recife for his previous film, Pictures of Ghosts (Retratos Fantasmas 2023). It was obviously helpful here as well. The Secret Agent runs for 158 minutes, and I was unfortunate enough to watch it in the Bazin room, but that didn’t stop me from thoroughly enjoying Filho’s best film thus far. It’s a triumph on every level.