NZIFF 2025 Craccum Coverage | The Secret Agent
A bloated, self-congratulatory mess.
The Secret Agent is the most pompous and pretentious film of NZIFF so far.
I can't help but be baffled at how sloppy and infuriating this film is edited. In the same way one should be weary of any film or pop song that has at least three or more credited writers, why director Mendonça persists with his collaborations between his two regular editors—Eduardo Serrano & Matheus Farias—tells me more about his inability to visualise and compose a coherent mise-en-scène without resorting to push-ins, reaction shots, and his incessant zooming into props, faces and portraits of the most pea-brained, limp-wristed inclusions of Brazil's past authoritarian leaders to assuage the lack of symbolism and irony middle-brow audiences can lap up and point to as evidence for the film's political sophistication. Dialogue scenes feel interminable and saturated with dead air misconstrued as tension, scenes featuring police and hitmen are put through the Scorsese blender and read like bad improv sessions kept in for the sake of 'spontaneity' and humour for their caricaturised villainy, and our Pablo Escobar protagonist (Wagner Moura, bless him) tries his damndest to be sympathetic and relatable amidst all the film's superfluous, shoe-horned plot conceits and story-within-a-story nonsense.
There's nary a sincere charm in this failed attempt to match its pulpy spy thriller and B-horror movie genre aspirations. This every-man James-Bond-cum-political-refugee film can't take itself seriously enough, but also can't be as campy as it wants to be; the perfect flick for the prude 40-50 year-old white demographic of Auckland's majority theatre-goers.
This cowardly 'political thriller' that abuses and misuses the withholding of narrative information inevitably obliterates any sense of genuine tension and painstakingly insists that all the film's patient dwellings on conversational detail will 'hopefully' make sense and become 'subtextual' once you get the gist of its character arcs trying to be as personable and humorous as they're scripted to be laid atop its shoddy story structure. The Secret Agent wants to pull a Shutter Island (2010) with its plot points through this guilt-ridden liberal idea of political persecution and intergenerational amnesia through its retroflective finale, a self-satisfying 'phew' not of narrative resolution, but precisely its opposite: ambiguity and abstraction of real material struggle.
This is how 'politically relevant' films like The Secret Agent short-change you: you remember the performances, the gunfight climax, the humorous side characters, the one surreal scene that's novel enough to share to your friends without spoiling the film for them, but you can't remember the name of the small Brazilian town where this film is set in, you don't know the character and identity of the town's inhabitants beyond bipetal herds with binocular vision looking aghast as another dead body hits the crime ridden-streets perpetrated by its own police force, you don't question this film's childish Manichean view of good, upstanding protagonists versus evil, morally contemptible antagonists, you don't question why this film moves at the speed of City of God (2002) in some sections and then grinds to a halt like you would Antonioni's characters speaking in malaise-filled confessions trying to negotiate its artistic and political legitimacy without coming off as slight. Unfortunately, it is just as inconsequential and as frustratingly boring as the 158-minute runtime tells you.
The Secret Agent is a film that dances around its air of plausible deniability afforded by its fictitious framework, decontextualising violence to the point of cliché, rendering its spectacular gory grotesquery as another narrative cog to propel its gangsterisms to genre fulfilment. You watch a film like The Secret Agent to convince yourself that you're on the 'right side' of history, as every other authoritarian government convinces its masses everywhere else in the globe. And because this is a film that will pander to industry experts'/audience's ignorance of history, this will be nominated for Best International Feature Film next year, because of course it will be; it's funded that way (Netflix, Arte France, Canal+, mk2 Films) with the intent to guarantee accolades.
O AGENTE SECRETO | Teaser Oficial
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