Still an extremely subversive film for modern Brazil which is dominated by a brand of leftism that wants to disarm the population. Without weapons, the americans would have genocided Bacurau and literally wiped it off the map.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir%C4%81t
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent_(2025_film)
If you haven't seen either, highly recommended. Don't watch Sirat if you're wanting a "good time," but I honestly can't think of the last time a film made me feel the way it did, especially the final minutes of it.
The Secret Agent is maybe as good though. Makes you want to say "they don't make them like this anymore.." It feels like a good long novel; every character, however minor, is rich, full of life, in some way beautiful. It's something about how the past has these pockets of clarity, bookended by loose ends and uncertainty. The mix of myth and anecdote. Pieces of life we can remember, those we can't... Five bags of popcorn.
Aren't almost all films partially funded by grants and state institutions?
For example the MPAA publishes guides like [1], and if you watch the credits of most films at the end you'll see "thanks to XYZ" where it was filmed.
Even if you film in Hollywood itself you are eligible for tax rebates[1]
[1] https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ol...
[2] https://www.ep.com/blog/california-expands-film-tax-incentiv...
The poor get a footnote: what happened to Zezé? But the poor were the biggest losers of the dictatorship. It was at the precise moment that the country needed to modernise that the coup made everything stop and the favelas grew along with violence in the periphery. Maybe City of God is a better depiction of what the dictatorship meant.
Propaganda is a hell of a thing. We are not even close to start that discussion, so it mostly won't appear anywhere.
Generals can't fix the economy they can only use violence and repression.
Because if so, not really. Most of their industrializing policies had the opposite effect. What they really achieved was to reduce the industrialization pace to snail-speed, and then to turn it negative.
On the first half, it was not for lack of trying, though. It was just for lack of competence.
The only way to develop a major industrial economy under the Western system post 1945 seems to have been - be a reliable and essential US ally - be given privileges to survive the occasional systemic shock. “Kicking away The Ladder” and “How Asia Works” are good books about this.
That was true of Nixon-Volcker and it was true of 2008-COVID periods. The truth is that under the dollar monetary zone the rules are what they are, until they get changed. Those who survive relatively unscathed are generally given a permissive path to do so.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2025...
Excellent aesthetics though but I am less sensitive to that
The journey is the point, basically :) The scenes with the fellow "refugees" are great, insightful glimpses into Brasil, into that 1970s Brasil in particular. They don't need to lead anywhere in particular for me to enjoy it.
That being said, I did like Bacurau and Aquarius more than The Secret Agent. But that speaks more to how incredible those films are.
Or maybe the newspapers used it to write about things that couldn't be written.
That's a very plausible interpretation. I grew up hearing about this myth :p
My take home at the end was that it was supposed to show the audience that the story was recreated from the parts of the story that could be pieced together by the future journalists. Basically it felt meandering because it was meandering to the journalists trying to figure out what happened. The ending with the son was the journalist trying to tie everything together for herself but he just didn’t have the information. Still dissatisfying.
And it is meant to feel meandering cause that is how this period feels for people trying to study it. There are many cases that we don't know what happened. We just know that the people were killed/disappeared. The perpetrators were never brought to Justice. We are not even sure who the specific perpetrators are in a lot of cases.
This is how the Brazilian military dictatorship operated. There are people in Brazil who want to go back to this period. They say that everything was better. The truth is that a lot of stuff that was bad, was so bad that we don't even have the records to properly reconstruct what happened.
Reminds me of something.
Yeah, so I had to lookup the leg after watching the movie. My interpretation was that it wasn't actually really surrealism. They juxtapose that scene with the lady reading from the newspaper about the attacking leg as if it was real. The reason I think this supports the "from the future journalist's perspective" interpretation is that those were legitimate articles ran, while there were serious cases not being reported on things like people going missing by the dictatorship. I think they included it to show the absurdity of what information was available and what information wasn't in the papers from that time. Also because of the lore of it all.
Brazil has so much to catch up compared to Argentina, which jailed most of the generals. This one tries it differently, not directing the blame directly, but one bystander who took advantage. Much better than I'm Still Here. But the Argentinian fascism era movie are much better still. El bunaerense, Crónica de una fuga,...
Pure cinema.
As someone who's never been to Brazil, certainly not in the 1970s, watching Secret Agent still felt like being transported there. How did they make a movie that makes you feel like you're in a familiar place you've never been to?
And then after about an hour, it picks up a bit more, and by the end, it felt like they directly transmitted to the audience the horror of the Brazilian junta in all kinds of subtle and dramatic ways. We don't see the resolution of the main character's story because that moment is lost. Memories of his life are fractured (through disjointed audio recordings) or repressed (by those closest to him).
Hard to put it into words. I started out disliking it and ended up loving it.
That's very much the director's philosophy. He values the dead time between things. I saw him talk years ago. He's a bit of an intelectual. Very competent too. I haven't watched Secret Agent yet though.
Beto Brant is another Brazilian director. He is phenomenal. Also artsy but his films usually work on a more traditional level as well. They're more satisfying. I highly recommend him -- particularly "O Invasor", "Ação Entre Amigos" and "Crime Delicado".
The world was impressive and immersive, but felt more like being on a tour than living a narrative.
Maybe you didn't like the movie, but it's got nothing to do with the theme of the movie.
Americans may complain about their boomers, but American boomers can't handle a candle to the obstinate grip Brasilian boomers have on the brazilian imaginarium and culture.
Imagine if every single hollywood movie done nowadays was kind of a pastiche of Antonioni's Blow Up, and if the Grateful Dead were the great gatekeepers of popular culture. Every single new cultural movement either paid homage to their style and their culture or run the risk of being discarded. In a certain way, that's how Brazilian culture works. Add the fact that culture is highly politicized, because a big part of it needs to be financed by the state and you have the perfect recipe for movies like "The Secret Agent".
There's also a certain societal expectation that for being considered part of the elite you need to be thoroughly versed on the political and cultural dynamics of the period. If you are a Brazilian you won't criticize those productions, lest you be seen as the brazilian version of the "deplorables", and you don't want to do it in your urban professional upper middle classe environment.
And this lead us to another very common issue. As being well versed on the vicissitudes and cultural zeitgeist of the period is seen as an elite signal, th stories will always be hard to understand for the non-initiated. And this is almost proposital, a certain manner of gatekeeping, because, while brazilian cinema wants to make as much money as American cinema, it absolutely abhors the idea of not being sophisticated, full of hermetic references for the non-conoisseur.
Watch the other comments on this thread. International audiences feels lost, while the Brazilians keep playing softball amongst them while exchanging their precious references that nobody else knows, including most brazilian not privileged enough to have had money to do their basic education on expensive private schools and then conclude their education for free on high quality publi universities.
That's how Brazilian media conglomerate culture works
He spends a lot of time on the 1960s and the "milicos escrotos" (f'in military folks) who took over at the time, but he's written a number of books on Brazilian history and has an entertaining style.
Are you sure your opinion isn't being colored by culture war bullshit?
Obviously by judging the comments it doesn't work for everyone, specially the leg scene confusing a lot people, which I didn't expect tbh. Gay bashing cops isn't a dictatorship only thing.
Only nice picture - then it qualifies as a good YouTube video, not really a movie. Because movies have some laws of the genre, this thing doesn’t even break any laws like great art does sometimes. It just presents a series of visially appealing but fundamentally dumb clips.
I envy people who have so much spare time to waste it on this so called art.
I understand finding the movie too long or difficult to follow without historical context, or even just not feeling it. But if this is your conclusion after the last scene, you either didn't watch it or are being contrarian.