19/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Kleber Mendonça Filho creates a playful, choral and sophisticated cinematic partition in dizzying narrative arpeggio, revealing the dark memory of Brazil under dictatorship

“There is one thing I saw and three things I did that I will not talk about.” With his new film, the remarkable and fascinating The Secret Agent, presented in competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Kleber Mendonça Filho has engaged in a high-flying cinematic conversation against forgetting with the cruel past of his country in the 1970s. The Brazilian filmmaker has transformed this step backwards into memories to be handled with care into a prototypical work, brilliantly slotting together different narrative layers and playing with genre cinema codes to find the best distance from his subject. This seemingly complicated architecture, rich in back and forths around a great number of secondary characters, progressively delivers all its secrets and messages in a fabulous whirlwind embodied by terrifically enjoyable archetypes (including some “bad guys”), even if tragedy lurks.

“I’m going to tell you a story”, “do you know the story of the niece?”, “tell the story in order”, “it was a little confusing”. Appearing throughout the plot, these few citations perfectly encapsulate the filmmaker’s approach, who advances his plot in three chapters (The little boy’s nightmare, The Identification Institute and Blood transfusion) and on several fronts (under water, like a secret agent) until he brings them together. In the centre of the adventure is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who we will later learn is really called Armando, a researcher finding refuge in clandestinity in Recife in 1977 as he waits to be able to leave the country with his young son, hiding in a residency welcoming several people in the same situation. Gravitating around him are a trio of local cops, corrupt and occupied by the story of a loose leg (whose provenance they are perfectly aware of) found in the belly of a shark, and two contract killers (who will hire a third one on site) coming from elsewhere and chasing Marcelo/Armando on account of an industrial business man. And, as a cherry on top of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s elaborate cake, two young women are listening, nowadays, to K7 tapes of testimonies recorded by the protection and exfiltration network.

Add corpses discreetly discarded, a tailing, a shootout, headlines, a flash of fantastic Z cinema, a movie theatre as a clandestine meeting place (and references, among others, to Jaws, The Exorcist and Fear Over The City), music on the radio and on record players, and a multitude of small suggestive details, and you’ll only get a relative idea of the luxurious richness of The Secret Agent. An expert when it comes to cryptically preparing his playing field, the Brazilian filmmaker makes his unique voice resonate by masterfully amalgamating all the voices of his chorus of characters. Hiding emotion for a long time under a formal mask of entertainment and homage to the heritage of the 7th art, the film reveals itself to be a choice piece in the museum to the murderous memory of Brazil.

The Secret Agent was produced by Cinemascópio (Brazil) and co-produced by MK Productions (France), One Two Films (Germany), Lemming Film (Netherlands) and Arte France Cinéma. mk2 Films is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)