Of the recent movies eaten up in one way or another with authoritarianism, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” is the most potent and exhilarating. It is obsessed on small and vast levels with how people live within a lethal regime, in this case the dictatorship that was in place in Brazil in the mid ‘70s. Every character is aware of being watched and so their every utterance has many meanings, contributing to a dense and forbidding atmosphere that also allows for a ripened sense of possibility. Filho feeds on that energy, grooving to a ’70s-vibe of live and let die.
Marcelo (Wagner Moura) is on his way to Recife when he stops his yellow Volkswagen Beetle at a rural gas station. Outside the station, a corpse attracts dust and wild dogs. The attendant tells Marcelo that the dead man was trying to steal gas. The police are on their way, though when they arrive, they are more interested in interrogating Marcelo on his motivations for entering Recife, extracting from him a “donation.”
The mastery of this scene has to do with its sense of casual, baked-in corruption. The corpse in the street is seen as nothing more or less than a nuisance. Life is cheap and gas is expensive and yeah, there’s a dead guy there, so what? This sequence — a movie in its own right — has a long fuse, recalling the coiled tension of early Steven Spielberg films, which is not accidental, and the epic talking-before-killing sequences of Quentin Tarantino movies like “Inglourious Basterds” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which is not accidental either. But Filho does not pay this scene off with violence. He lets that tension hang for the better part of 160 minutes.
“The Secret Agent” does not have the feel of most political thrillers, which tend to unfold in drab corridors that emphasize the banality of corporate and governmental evil. This is a spicy movie, less a story of white collar drones than a full-blooded thriller with jolts of sex and horror and tragedy and surrealism that are tied together by a sense of the absurd that suits authoritarian and fascist regimes. The cop can’t simply shake Marcelo down, as there must be a pretense of civility to lend dignity to abuses of authority.
Marcelo is a man of mystery, a handsome and wounded man with an air of empathy that only makes him sexier and more charismatic. Moura, worthy of the best actor award that he won at Cannes last year, is as adept as Filho at resisting easy reductions. He turns Marcelo into an everyman and a star, simultaneously, lending the movie both a romantic grandeur and a sense of the granular cost of authoritarianism.
In Recife, Marcelo connects with the underground resistance in an apartment complex. His contact is Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a small woman pushing 80 who alerts him to the ins and outs of the neighborhood, proffering a meeting with an attractive neighbor, Claudia (Hermila Guedes), a dental assistant who works on Marcelo’s teeth as a means of post-coital bonding. Circling the resistance is a network of killers and corporate employers, who are rendered by Filho and the cast with the same sense of fine-grained humanity that’s reserved for the heroes. Unforgettable details keep surfacing, as the film is the sort of novelistic wealth of riches that can box a critic into a game of “and then this happened.” (Fear not: I’ve revealed maybe a quarter of the plot.)
The fundamental toll of authoritarianism is embodied here by the gulfs that are forged between children and parents who are missing, dead, damaged and unknown. Marcelo’s relationship with his young son, Fernando (Enzio Nunes), is stretched thin by the circumstances that force him to be on the lam. Marcelo’s mother died when he was young, and he uses his new front job to try to find out more about her. Many of the killers are father-son pairs that are marked by the familiar tensions that exist between parents and children, especially the son’s need to live up to the father’s expectations, which are curdled by the evil that these men perform for their government.
Filho fashions intricate matrices of longing and alienation and yokes them to the perversions of a society off its axis. The movie-mad filmmaker even turns Spielberg’s “Jaws” into an object of Proustian yearning, as the narrative twists into an ouroboros to allow for Maura to play not only Marcelo but Fernando, the boy who grows to assume his father’s mantle as a kind and feeling man who nevertheless remains lost.
Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother” is a collection of three short films that are also built around familial tensions. Each short is centered on a pair of siblings who visit one of their parents, and it’s perhaps no accident that in the most hopeful of the trio the parents are dead, leaving their children to sort out their own identities. But this isn’t a soggy, self-pitying movie — all three pieces, especially the first two, are enlivened by Jarmusch’s cutting deadpan timing.
The first and best section, “Father,” finds Jeff (Adam Driver) and his sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) driving into the New Jersey countryside to see their dad (Tom Waits). Their father lives in a small house with many foundational problems as an eccentric with little money, walled off by a self-absorption that he tries to obscure with contrived displays of gratitude. Having a similar kind of father, this setup had me at hello.
Jeff and Emily arrive at the house, sit with dad and have a glass of water, and later tea, and have a conversation that is riddled with the children’s resentments and the father’s equally powerful deflection of them. Jarmusch remains a master of unspoken tension, and the subtext here is troublingly real. The father knows he’s lost a meaningful relationship with his children and has essentially given up — that understanding, which is rare for most movies with daddy issues — gives this piece real bite.
That bite is intensified by a canny twist ending that suggests that he wouldn’t want to get closer to his children even if he could. He thrives on distance. Driver and Bialik are superb, but this piece belongs to Waits, who is thorny, poignant and very funny.
“Mother” is nearly as effective, with Charlotte Rampling as a wealthy mystery writer who during tea presides over the insecurities nursed by her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps). The sisters are a study in familiar poles: Timothea is the dweeby overachiever to Lilith’s selfish flake, who makes up stories and consumes all the oxygen in the room more or less to mother’s approval.
Rampling is as sharp as she’s ever been here, and she doesn’t rest on aloofness. You sense that this woman wants to connect with her daughters — in her own way. You also sense that she might not be interested enough in their lives to call them out on their delusions. Love or habit? Jarmusch doesn’t give you an easy way out.
“Sister Brother” is warmer and cuddlier and perhaps not so coincidentally much less interesting than the shorts that precede it. Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabat) are hip, sexy twins who are in hip, sexy Paris to pack up what’s left of the belongings of their hip and sexy parents, who died in a plane crash that was presumably hip and sexy. Their being hip and sexy is pretty much the whole short, apart from the distracting chemistry that they seem to have with one another. Maybe it’s a twin thing.
In terms of design, one can see what “Sister Brother” is doing in this film: offering contrast, a shot of heat as counterpoint to the much chillier emotional palette of the other episodes. But Skye and Billy’s open and affectionate relationship leaves much less room for freighted angry subtext, the love language of “Father” and “Mother.”
I’ve seen “Father Mother Sister Brother” twice now and I can say that, like most Jarmusch movies, it’s a grower. It suggests a submerged New Yorker story with crunchy bits of Jarmusch’s boutique-hipster precision. There are through lines between the three stories that are so odd as to almost suggest a parody of our need for through lines.
One symbolic flourish is so blunt that does a loop de loop again into subtlety: in each thread, the family members are united in various ways by the same red color in their clothing. Goofy, at first, and that’s the point. But pay attention to how this joke mutates over the course of the movie to show the ties that do and don’t bind.
“The Secret Agent” and “Father Mother Sister Brother” are both playing at Movieland. A collection of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s earlier and also worthwhile movies are now streaming at the Criterion Channel.
