Awash with saturated colour and steeped in Brazil's history of authoritarianism, Kleber Mendoça Filho's The Secret Agent has emerged as a serious contender for the Palme d'Or. A former film critic, programmer and now a leading voice in Brazilian cinema, Mendoça Filho's fourth feature -- and his third in Cannes Competition -- is a political thriller, a tribute to disappeared dissidents, and a deft ode to the way memory is passed through time and technology.
That a good part of the intrigue takes place inside a local cinema, and that Stephen Spielberg's Jaws is a recurring motif, adds extra points for cinephilic dedication. Wagner Moura (best known for playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos) plays Marcello, an engineering scholar and dissident in 1977 who flees persecution back to his hometown of Recife (also the director's native city). He takes refuge in a building shared by several "refugees" -- a stinging label for dissidents and others who have fled injustice. Marcello is taken under the wing of a movement that protects political protesters, and his plan is to get a fake passport and leave the country with his young son.
The carnival is taking place -- costumed dancers and brass bands turn the streets into an exuberant riot. Two hitmen are sent from Sao Paolo to take out Marcello. Meanwhile, the severed leg of an unidentified victim turns up inside the gut of a shark, the gruesome crime quickly elevated to a local pop-culture myth. We see characters making phone calls from brightly coloured kiosks and speaking into a cassette tape recorder. And then, midway through, we see an iPhone. It belongs to a researcher who revisits Marcello's case from the present, connecting the dots of his story with tapes and archival records. The Secret Agent is a story of Brazil's past glimpsed through contemporary lenses, and a story of how the voices of those thought to be lost can be reclaimed -- through cinema, why not?
All these strands come together through Filho's nimble, fluent touch, an antithesis to our familiar perception of taut Hollywood thriller. Even the climactic assassination sequence moves with the beat of a dexterous carnival dancer. Earlier this year, Brazil won its first Oscar (in the International Feature category) with Walter Salles' I'm Still Here, set roughly in the same period of military dictatorship. The Secret Agent, regardless of how far it goes in Cannes, will surely be a contender for the prize next year.
Another film cooking up a divisive reaction at Cannes is the EDM-fuelled apocalypse-now Sirat, a road movie that hurtles its motley crew of dopeheads and desperadoes through the desert. The director is Oliver Laxe, a French-Spanish filmmaker whose mythologising of the Saharan landscape has become his modus operandi. In Sirat -- an Arabic word referring to a path or a bridge -- a father, with a young son in tow, arrives at a rave party in a craggy North African desert outpost to look for his lost daughter, last seen at another such rave (this must be a thing for European ravers).
Pumping heart-crunching beats through high-powered subwoofers, the wild bunch of LSD-charged ravers lose themselves in the music, isolating their consciousness from the sensory reality of world. But the world intrudes as soldiers arrive to announce an evacuation -- some kind of worldwide catastrophe, likely a geopolitical calamity though left unexplained in the film, has erupted and everyone has to leave for the capital. In short, the sky may be bright, the music may be loud, but the world is coming to an end.
Luis, the father, and his son Esteban escape with a band of ravers (heavily tattooed, some with ostensibly missing limbs) who believe another desert party is happening and are determined to go find it. A rave as the world is exploding? Thus begins one of the strangest road trips in modern cinema (stranger than Mad Max, sure) as the fatherly Luis rides through the inhospitable landscape with the drugged-up nomads, who apparently have no idea where the location of the fabled rave is. Luis' plan to locate his missing daughter turns into a more immediate need to survive.
What the film is interested in is turning the visceral idea of a place -- the hostile, treacherous and mesmerising desert -- into a state of mind. If the world refuses to let you live, if it takes away everything that once defined the purpose of your existence, what will you do? Keep driving? Keep partying? Escape, but to where? Or accept it all without a fuss? This hypothesis is pushed -- and pushed and pushed -- to a climax so extreme it will either leave you stunned or in perpetual disbelief.
The Secret Agent and Sirat show how filmmakers can still find a way to extract power from cinema. Both films are unlikely to have a theatrical release, though they have high chances of landing in one of the film festivals later this year. The Cannes Film Festival runs until Saturday.
