the secret agent (w&d kleber mendonça filho)

I had been told so much about this film, and harboured a longing to see it for so long. And there are few better cinemas in central London to watch it than the Garden Cinema, where our own Latino experience occurred last year. Kleber Mendonça Filho sets out to make an epic, a homage to Recife and to an era. The film opens with a brief montage of stills of musicians, and then moves into a superb opening scene as Wagner Moura’s character, Armando, fills up with petrol. The scene is perhaps ten minutes long and completely captures the sense of being in the middle of nowhere in deepest Brazil. Then Armando arrives in Recife and the film settles down into something else, a leisurely north eastern reflection on corruption, carnival and the cinema. The film is peppered with humour and the grotesque. It’s in the tradition of Babenco’s Lucio Flavio, without quite possessing the hard edge of the Argentine director’s movie. It feels like a movie about that time, told from the standpoint of a safer time, something the film’s 21st century framing device would appear to acknowledge. 

bacurau (w&d juliano dornelles, kleber mendonça filho)

Bacurau is a curious case of the film itself being far better than its script. How can this be, you might say? But the truth is that the script has more loose ends than you can count. The female protagonist who hardly figures in the plot. The water crisis that isn’t left just unresolved, but also forgotten. The shallow attempts at characterisation of the mercenaries. Udo Kier’s motivation for turning on his own. And there’s plenty more. However, somehow, in spite of all this, Bacurau more or less triumphs. Firstly because it uses the classic trope of the Western, and turns it on its head, making the gringos the bad guys. Secondly, and above all, because of the portrayal of the small town of Bacurau itself, with its large cast of diverse and engaging characters, its communal events, its resident DJ, its solidarity. The last element is perhaps the most telling. As mentioned, it looks as though Teresa is set up to be the protagonist as she arrives back in the threatened town, but her narrative is never developed. Instead it’s the town itself which emerges as the protagonist, the town which fights back and triumphs over the gringo invaders. The narrative is wafer-thin but a wafer filled with ice cream. There are so many details to enjoy, so many telling moments, and above all such conviction in the acting and the directors’ capacity to capture what the interior of Brazil is really like whilst adhering to a genre format.