Returning after Bacurau and Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonça Filho has garnered the most acclaim of his career thus far with The Secret Agent. Earning an ultra-rare two prizes at this year’s Cannes (Best Director and, for Wagner Moura, Best Actor), it’ll now arrive from NEON beginning November 26. Ahead of the release, a new trailer has arrived.
As Leonardo Goi said in his Cannes review, “Mendonça Filho’s gaze is far more receptive to the surreal, and his cinephilia winds up shaping the film’s style. Photographed by Evgenia Alexandrova in Panavision and rife with vintage wipe edits, split-diopter shots, and needledrops, The Secret Agent doesn’t just exist in conversation with the genre films from the decade in which most of it unfurls; it also testifies, time and again, to the director’s unwavering belief in cinema’s capacity to disquiet and mesmerize. “
Here’s NYFF’s synopsis: “The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such breathtakers as Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57), returns with a thrillingly unpredictable, empowering political fable about people swept up in forces beyond their control. A dynamic, shape-shifting epic set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, The Secret Agent earned him the Best Director award at Cannes. Wagner Moura was also deservedly honored as Best Actor at the festival for his magnetic performance as a widowed former university researcher whose life has been violently upended by the greed and vengeance of a government bureaucrat. On the run and living under an alias during the country’s military dictatorship, he tries to escape, while also reconnecting with the young son he had to leave behind. Even this brief description cannot fully prepare the viewer for the zigzagging subplots and delights of Mendonça’s eccentric and affectionate ode to the movies and the Brazil of his youth—and to maintaining individuality amid abuses of power.”
See the trailer and NYFF Q&A below.
The post The Secret Agent Trailer: Wagner Moura is on the Run in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Thriller first appeared on The Film Stage.
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