Bearing no relation to the Joseph Conrad novel, the competition entry “The Secret Agent,” from the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Bacurau”), is a tricky item to discuss. Not only does it have the kind of convoluted plot—filled with double identities, assassins, and possible red herrings—that you would expect from a film with that title, but it’s also a movie that backs into revealing what it’s really about. It’s a quintessential second-viewing film at a festival that generally only allows for a first.
So let’s tread lightly. “The Secret Agent” is principally set in 1977, “a period of great mischief” in Brazil, per the opening text. It’s also a period of military dictatorship, and possible connections between the regime and corporate corruption, particularly in the energy field, are just one of the film’s subjects. The opening scene is set at a gas station. Our protagonist (Wagner Moura) pulls in and notices that there’s a dead body lying nearby. Apparently, the dead man got shot while trying to steal oil. But the police are busy with carnival season and haven’t yet been able to remove the corpse; it’s been a couple of days already. Some highway patrol officers pull in and hassle Moura’s character until he bribes one of them with a cigarette pack. They leave without clearing away the body.
The Moura character, sometimes called Marcelo, will spend the rest of the movie in Recife, Mendonça Filho’s hometown. Marcelo’s wife is dead, but he has a son there as well as a father-in-law who works as a projectionist at a local cinema. (The Cinema São Luiz, if I caught it correctly—also featured in Mendonça Filho’s preceding feature, the lovely essay documentary “Pictures of Ghosts,” a memorial to the Recife movie houses of yesteryear.)
Strange things are happening in the city. A severed human leg is found inside the carcass of a shark, baffling investigators. (“Jaws” is playing in Brazilian theaters now, but Marcelo’s son isn’t yet old enough to see it.) Two out-of-town hit men receive an assignment to kill someone who fits Marcelo’s description. Udo Kier turns up as a World War II refugee. And at a crucial point, well into the running time, the director starts toying with the chronology—the appearance of earbuds is a hint—revealing that “The Secret Agent” has been operating on a different level from what we’ve been led to expect.
The plot also incorporates a casual romance and bursts of sudden, explosive violence. (Mendonça Filho pays tribute to Brian De Palma with a split diopter, a split screen, and possibly even the character named Bobbi, à la “Dressed to Kill.”) And for all that, the director ultimately takes “The Secret Agent” to a contemplative place. Like “Pictures of Ghosts,” the film is a memory piece, using a genre framework to reflect on Brazilian history and the nature of family. Again, Mendonça Filho also pays tribute to his hometown and its changed landscape. Running more than two and a half hours, this daring, structurally complex picture has enough going on to fill every phantom cinema in Recife.
“The Secret Agent” was shot in ’Scope, but the aspect ratio that clearly defines this festival is the squarish 1.33:1, which is turning up in one film after another. It’s used in “Sound of Falling,” “Nouvelle Vague,” “Die My Love,” “The Phoenician Scheme,” and “The Love That Remains,” a drama from the Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason that’s showing in the Cannes Premiere section. That said, for the first 45 minutes or so, Pálmason keeps close-ups to a minimum, almost as if he were trying to ease his way into the world of these characters.
Completely different in scale from Pálmason’s period epic “Godland,” shown at Cannes in 2022, “The Love That Remains” concerns a family of five. The parents, Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason), were high school sweethearts and had their first child when they were still quite young. More than two decades later, they decided to separate, although they hadn’t quite worked out the parameters for how to do so.
They live in different houses now, but they are often together with the children (and their scene-stealing sheepdog, Panda). Anna is a visual artist struggling to get her career off the ground. (A Swedish gallerist stops by for an extended visit in which he talks endlessly but can’t be bothered to seriously consider Anna’s work.) Magnús, or Maggi, is a fisherman who is away from the others for chunks of time. (When a colleague asks if he and Anna are still together, he replies that he isn’t sure. “If you don’t know, who does?” the colleague says.) They are still close enough that Maggi feels comfortable dropping by late at night. Anna has to work out her own boundaries on kicking him out.
Pálmason is content to simply observe this particular messiness as it’s experienced by the adults and their three children. The film’s register isn’t strictly naturalistic: It opens with a baldly metaphorical shot of an empty house’s roof coming apart, and the filmmaker, without too much inflection, subtly weaves in moments that are imagined: a plane crash, an attack by a giant rooster, an incident in which a dummy that the children use as an archery target comes to life. (The archery material also supplies the film’s funniest sight gag, which shouldn’t be spoiled but involves an arrow that protrudes uncomfortably close to the lens.)
“The Love That Remains” is an exceedingly mild film, and that’s meant as significant praise. It doesn’t manufacture incident—the early moments on the industrial boat made me think we were in for a gloss on “Breaking the Waves”—and it doesn’t offer tidy resolutions. It simply shows family members who have a complicated affection for one another working things out as they go.
Lav Diaz’s “Magellan,” also in Cannes Premiere, is yet another movie shot in 1.33:1. (Let’s keep this up, filmmakers; end the tyranny of the widescreen era!) Except that this time, close-ups and even medium shots are rare. Despite the star presence of Gael García Bernal as the Portuguese circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan, this is the type of movie in which the lead says relatively little. Indeed, in some distant or busy compositions, it takes a moment to realize that García Bernal is even in the shot.
Anyone familiar with the Filipino filmmaker Diaz (“Norte, the End of History”) knows that he operates in a minimalist mode, making extremely long movies (at 160 minutes, “Magellan” is on the short side) that demand committing to the experience.
“Magellan” has no score—only the sounds of the elements—and it doesn’t provide much context apart from title cards that clarify abrupt shifts in place and time. The film begins in 1511 in Malacca, in present-day Malaysia, and ends after Magellan’s death in 1521 in Cebu, in what is now the Philippines. But both the Atlantic and the Pacific get crossed in the intervening decade.
The fact that the film is arduous to sit through is appropriate for the subject. “Magellan” is less concerned with having characters recite grand plans for colonizing (although one delivers an early speech to that effect) than with conveying what it feels like to be on a ship for months on end: its brutality (Magellan condemns two men who are caught having sex to execution, a punishment that Diaz quite viscerally evokes), its grime, its sogginess in a storm.
The movie devotes perhaps equal time—and, significantly, the first and last word—to the experiences of the Indigenous residents whom Magellan encounters and tries to convert to Christianity. The multilingual interactions are not something that Diaz has any interest in speeding up. Only in occasional, gauzily shot visions of that Magellan has of his wife does the film depart from its physically grounded texture. “Magellan” is, in short, a movie of tremendous integrity—and also, by design, extremely tough viewing.