1/3-1/8

Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent

[mild spoilers]

I think maybe I was oversold on this? It has a marvelous and varied cast of characters, with charisma to spare, and its evocation of 1977 Brazil feels convincingly lived-in, but its narrative felt ungainly, a carrier-bag of digressions, with a scattershot approach as to which points in its shaggy-dog plot were afforded consequence, emotional weight, or even resolution. Interesting characters slide temporarily into the forefront (Udo Kier's German expat comes to mind), contributing color to the milieu but not performing much else in the way of narrative function. I don't mind films that are impressionistic or that run on vibes, but this feels like a deeply odd choice for a movie that's ostensibly a political thriller. It's telling that the most dramatic sequence in the film involves a character who we don't really care about pursuing a different character who we don't really care about, while our protagonist is safely hiding in a totally different building, and the violent conclusion of that sequence feels weightless—it could easily have resolved the other way with no change to the overall plot machinery of the film.

Ultimately, I spent much of the runtime struggling with the nagging sensation that I didn't really have a sense of what the film was "about"—Mendonça Filho only seemed half interested in ratcheting the tension, deepening the stakes of the story, or even developing a clear set of themes, and by the time those things finally begin to feel locked in, the film performs a last-act swerve, a needless hard reboot which jettisons whatever investment we have mustered for the existing cast. I'm glad the little boy eventually gets to see JAWS, but why did I walk away from a film with dozens of interesting characters with that being the only thing I cared about?

Hirozaku Kore-Eda's After Life // [rewatch]

Cattet & Forzani's Reflection In A Dead Diamond //

Zach Cregger's Weapons // [rewatch]