1325 The Secret Agent

[domino harvey]

Confirmed as coming from Criterion

[Soy Cuba]

Couldn't find a thread on this, so apologies if there is one

I've only seen the directors previous film Bacarau of his filmography which I enjoyed. This is a very good film reminiscent of last year's 'I’m Still Here’ i.e – highlighting the families torn apart by past dictatorships. Wagner Moura is great as the central academic figure that goes into hiding as political power supresses him and his family. Some people don’t like the ending as there is a tone shift, but I thought it was very poignant.

8.6/10

I do have one burning question though:

Spoiler

At the end Flavia says her grandfather was from Recife so she has links there. This is a very deliberate piece of dialogue....her grandfather would have been about Armando's age - who is she talking about? Which character would he have been? I've wracked my brains and I can't see which character would make sense here. Anybody have any guesses?

[domino harvey]

Coming in September

With an electrifying blend of kinetic punch and elegiac historical sweep, Kleber Mendonça Filho connects life under Brazil’s twentieth-century military dictatorship to the living present, delivering a kaleidoscopic period thriller pulsing with resonance. In 1977, under the alias Armando, a man (Wagner Moura) arrives in the city of Recife to try to make a fresh start with his young son. However, the threat of violence immediately encroaches, while around him swirl corrupt cops, grimy hit men, haunted exiles, and a wild urban legend that ignites a public frenzy. Continually spinning off its temporal and narrative axes, The Secret Agent unfurls an epic canvas teeming with life and love for those who refuse to submit to systems of oppression.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital master, approved by director Kleber Mendonça Filho, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
Pictures of Ghosts (2023), a companion film by Mendonça Filho
Making-of documentary featuring interviews with Mendonça Filho, actor Wagner Moura, and other members of the cast and crew
New interviews with director of photography Evgenia Alexandrova and sound mixer Cyril Holtz
New video essay featuring Mendonça Filho
Deleted scenes
Archival material that inspired the film, with commentary by Mendonça Filho
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film programmer and curator Dennis Lim

New cover by Drusilla Adeline/Sister Hyde

[zedz]

Great to see, but Pictures of Ghosts is in no way a companion film to The Secret Agent (though it arguably is to most of his other features!)

I'm surprised to see it here since it's already available on BluRay from Grasshopper Films, but I won't look a gifthorse in the mouth.

A great film in a month of only great films.

[senseabove]

Great to see, but Pictures of Ghosts is in no way a companion film to The Secret Agent (though it arguably is to most of his other features!)

Mendonça has spoken (here, for example) about how his archival research for Pictures... was on his mind while writing The Secret Agent—rather obviously in the secondary thread that ties the film together at the end, as well as what we are initially led to believe is the main character's reason for being where he is—and the relationship between the two movies wasn't uncommon for critics to bring up (e.g. here's Melissa Anderson saying "The Secret Agent forms an oblique diptych with Pictures of Ghosts"). If the film is, to simplify it extremely, about the relationships between personal and communal history—movie theaters being a specific, exemplary site for exactly that historical intersection, one of which serves as a significant location in the movie—I don't think it's the least bit of a stretch unless one specifically requires "companion" to mean "I conceived of and developed these two films simultaneously and intended them to be direct comments on each other."

[zedz]

Well, I would have thought that "companion film" suggested a particular relationship that was much closer between those two films than between Pictures of Ghosts and Neighbouring Sounds, or Aquarius, or Green Vinyl. And frankly, I don't see it. They're all Recife-based memory films to some extent, and of those The Secret Agent seems to me the least dependent on the specificity of that place.

But then, I've never understood this critical compulsion to form specious trilogies out of three vaguely related films by the same director.