The Secret Agent

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

THE SECRET AGENT   ***

Kleber Mendonça Filho

2025

IDEA:  In 1977 Recife, Brazil, a former university professor goes undercover as he's hunted by a vindictive government rival.

BLURB:  The Secret Agent is an epic political thriller light on conventional thrills, but this is by design; Mendonça is less interested in linear narrative momentum than creating a socio-historical panorama brimming with intricate, lived-in detail. In this way, the 1970s-set film sometimes recalls those contemporaneous Robert Altman works with their sprawling casts, meandering plots, and percolating mood of epochal turmoil. There are no optical zooms here (missed opportunity?), but there are vibrant anamorphic PanaVision and split diopters to give life to a complex tale of political persecution and the survival of memory through blood and media — and bloody media! Indeed, one of the most delightful threads running through The Secret Agent is the intertext of Spielberg’s Jaws, which comes to mediate between the spectacle of popular culture and that of a violent, predatory reality, both of which capture the public’s imagination in ways Mendonça creatively imagines. With the exception of its most traditional “genre” sequences, though — a bit of outré grindhouse play and a climactic gun chase — The Secret Agent eschews any such ratcheting Jaws-like suspense. The slackness, while allowing ample room for a panoply of distinct characters to reveal their many sides, does not always serve the film; one wishes for a little more juice, whether through narrative action, tonal variation, or formal surprise. The power rests in the depth of Mendonça’s script, which, like last year’s I’m Still Here, flashes forward to the present to show how the preservation of personal and historical memory, forever entwined, is ongoing work that involves us all.