NZIFF: The Secret Agent

Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho painstakingly recreates the Recife of the 70s dictatorship years in this sprawling, colourful spy thriller like no other. Winner of Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes.

Following up his incendiary crowd-pleaser Bacarau and haunting cinema memory piece Pictures of Ghosts, iconoclastic Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho scored the Best Director prize at Cannes with this rousing political thriller. An extensive, deeply immersive recreation of the Brazilian dictatorship years through the eyes of a laconic, drifting secret agent holed up in Recife, the film ripples and shimmers with vibrant colour, action and innumerable absurd tangents, yet is constantly grounded by Wagner Moura’s soulful performance which earned him Best Actor at Cannes.

The scars of dictatorship are everywhere in The Secret Agent, as is the hovering spectre of political violence; as the film unfolds with the sprawl and confidence of a great novel, and said violence draws ever closer, the mystery of just who Moura’s Marcelo actually is, slowly comes into focus.

To watch The Secret Agent is to be fully drawn into this carefully recreated time, rendered deeply cinematic by Filho’s customary visual trickery and wonderfully eclectic soundtrack. A director known for handling deathly serious topics with fleet-footedness and winking mischief, it may be Mendonça Filho’s most staggering statement yet. — Tom Augustine

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