KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It's Olympics week, full of figure skating controversies, ski jumping controversies, and yes, even curling controversies. All it really left time for was a Saturday double feature at the movies.
This Week:
The Secret Agent (aka "O Agente Secreto" - 2025, d. Kleber Mendonça Filho - in theatre)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026, d. Gore Verbinski - in theatre)
Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8", 1989, d. André Melançon - Crave)
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I've been keen on seeing the film since it's Cannes triumph, intrigued by the title and its 1977 setting because I'm sort of an espionage guy. I knew little else going in, other than many critics casually described it as "weird", and "not really a spy movie". I hadn't even seen a trailer.
And, indeed, it is a weird film, but not weird for weirdness sake. It makes highly unusual storytelling decisions which are, in its own way, disarming without being shocking.. You cannot anticipate the moves this film makes, not without prior awareness, and even then, it would be really hard to see how the pieces fit without experiencing how they actually play out in concert with each other.
The Academy Awards have really embraced the atypical in recent years, starting with The Shape of Water, and continuing with Everything, Everywhere All At Once and Poor Things among others in recent years. Given how outre the storytelling is here, I would say this is maybe its most unusual best picture nomination thus far. And yet, all that uncommon narrative is in service of something. I'll come back to that.
When we meet Wagner Moura's Marcelo, he's pulled into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Before he's even stopped the car he spies a dead body in the adjacent dusty field, covered by a sheet of cardboard. His gut instinct is to keep going, even as the portly station attendant comes out. It's a bad scene but it's evident there's more on Marcelo's mind than just the dead body. The title of the film crafts in the viewer's mind all sorts of paranoid thoughts on behalf of Marcelo. There's an incredible tension to the scene that the charismatic station attendant slowly disarms, finally easing when the attendant shoos a pack of wild dogs away from the body as if he's had to do it dozens of times by now. But then a police car shows up and the tension's right back up again as they're not there for the body, but to pay attention to the yellow VW they had passed (once again, the tension is only disarmed by comedy, as a family-filled car is about to pull into the station, only to spy the body and rethink their decision, the young children catch sight and scream).
The first scene is prefaced by a series of pictures, pictures that look like legit photos of the era and not manufactured for the film. It's easy enough to intone that director Filho is setting the scene for the time, place and attitude of the film (as is the caption, "Brazil 1977, a time of great mischief" which seems to be an understatement). I do not have any context for Brazil of this time period, it's political turmoil of the time is not something I've ever delved into. The fact that there is political upheaval is not lost on the viewer, but what is actually happening is not explained. This is not a film interested in educating an exterior audience, and I'm sure Brazilians are very in tune with the the imagery, captions, billboards, and intonations made in the film that would float past or at least not fully register with an outside audience.
It is then credit to the film's writer/director that this film so readily resonates outside its home country. At first it may be his stylistic choices, but any examination of what the stylistic choices are about all lead back to the themes of the film, which are about corruption, class structures, money, power and justice, as well as the unusual bonds of families. There's also too much to unpack after only one viewing.
Marcelo finds himself in Recife - a northeastern coastal city in Brazil - hosted in a, for lack of better term, refugee hostel with others who we learn are fleeing persecution of some sort or another. Also in Recife is Marcelo's son and his in-laws. Marcelo's has to remind his son that the boy's mother died of cancer, but it seems unspoken that she was perhaps assassinated. Marcelo's intent is to get his son and flee the country, but obstacles are in the way. In the meantime, he's been posted at a documents bureau, where he searches for some form of identification of his mother, a seeming lifelong quest he's had to just prove her existence (the story, explained late in the film, is a troubling one, and seems to have specific cultural resonance to the country that I don't fully understand).
Meanwhile, a shark is found with a human leg inside it. The police chief and his two thug sons seem very intent on handling this discovery themselves. In the wake of Jaws' success, the film's reputation living large in the minds of kids too young to see it, the story of the leg takes on a life of its own in the newspapers. Urban legends are built up around the leg, the phantom limb starts taking on a life of its own.
Marcelo is also being hunted by two hitmen, a father/stepson team. The repeating pattern of fathers and sons and parents and children seems very deliberate, yet I struggle to understand fully the significance. Again, this is a film that will need repeat viewings and probably some extracurricular reading for full dissection. And these seemingly disparate threads - Marcelo, the police chief and the hitmen - all become rather woven into the same thatch.
Outside all of this is a piece of the film set in the relative modern day, where a young woman is listening and digitizing audiocassettes featuring the voices of some of the players in the film. The abrupt jumps to the modern day are just that, abrupt, and yet, there's a sort of comfort in the fact that this character is discovering the events along with us. She seems to know more than we do, but with less exacting detail. The bigger surprise of these segments is they progress without ever using them as opportunity for exposition, which could have easily been the case. The purpose of these scenes, though they interrupt only a few times in the film, is only made clear in the final sequence of the movie, and it's kind of the lynchpin to the whole thing.
The Secret Agent is not at all what I expected given the title, and it's a far more unique film than I could ever have anticipated. It's not far afield from the works of a Bong Joon Ho or Yorgos Lanthamos, and yet director Filho is also not aping other directors work either. If ever he was in the past, in this his fourth feature, he's operating with his own voice (I'll need to dig up his three prior productions). Moura, who has been quietly proficient in supporting (and even lead) roles in North American productions, shines here as both a charming and adept protagonist. Expect Moura to get a few big chances to shine in the next few years.
I predict The Secret Agent won't win any Academy Awards in its nominated categories except perhaps Best Foreign, but given how it penetrated this year's ballot, I expect Filho will be a prominent awards contender and higher profile filmmaker in the coming years. The film, however, will live on beyond this year. It's just too deep and too unique to get lost in the sea of generic movies.
[Poster talk... many of the Secret Agent posters adopt the aesthetic of 70's spy or paranoia thriller posters, whether it's using a painted style of the era, or establishing the feel of a hand-cropped photograph. I love so many of the posters for this film. The most common theme across the posters is the image of Moura holding a telephone, looking anxious...such a 70's vibe recalling the image of Gene Hackman with the headphones on in The Conversation or Robert Redford at the telephone in 3 Days of the Condor.]
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The film opens with a rapid sequence of up close shots of aspects of a Los Angeles diner setting. Focusing more on the patrons than objects, but giving us little hints as to character or dynamics without showing us their faces. We get a sense that there's life here. And then there's a rattle, a barely noticeable skip in the image and a tell-tale "fwump" sound effect that tells us savvy audience members that something metaphysical, even temporal, has happened.
Into a busy diner walks Rockwell, sporting massive scraggly reddish-gray beard, a wild look in his eye, a manic trash-bin wardrobe, and complete disregard for any sort of social formalities. He interrupt the scene, starts spouting some end-of-the-world gibberish, touches upon his time-travel shenanigans and starts looking for recruits to help save the world. He's convinced the right combination of people in this diner will save humanity from a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence, but he just keeps finding disaster. Nobody is interested, which, he seems prepared for.
But this time, he gets a volunteer from Susan (Juno Temple) who we learn in flashback, lost her son in a school shooting. No worries about that though, as she finds out her son can be cloned and because he died in a school shooting, the government will pay for most of it, and what they don't cover can be paid for by her son-clone having a sponsored ads setting.
The man from the future conscripts the rest of his crew, including troubled couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), teachers who we learn accidentally awakened the teenage social media hive mind and are now on the run.
The final team member was hesitantly accepted by the man from the future. At first Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), in her princess party dress and smudged makeup, was deemed too weird, but a trick of a fateful bottle of hot sauce convinces the man to bring her along. We learn that Ingrid was born with an allergy to phones and wifi. The signals give her headaches and trigger nose bleeds. She kind of hates the technological world, as it's a bit of a hellscape for her to navigate.
The film jumps between the perilous journey the rag tag group needs to make from the diner to a 9-year-old's house where the child is busy inventing the AI that will disrupt the world and the flashbacks that fill in the blanks on the most prominent members of the group. (Asim Choudhry's Scott doesn't get such treatment, alas).
The story in general, but flashbacks especially, feel like truncated, lighthearted episodes of Black Mirror, just technology accepted into society but making everything slightly worse when promising to make things better. It's hard not to call this "Black Mirror Lite" but it kinda is.
The third act makes some big moves and in doing so undercuts its own reality. The logic of the film seems to get tossed aside unless I'm missing a clear explanation/revelation somewhere. It doesn't stop being entertaining, but it doesn't hold together conceptually.
The performances are fun, by and large, and there's a good sense of humour around the idea of technology destroying our lives but also being impossible to live without. It's really in how it's applied, awareness of the impact it has, and how we react to it that the film is concerned with, but...not that concerned. It's a satire, but it's also just silly. It's making statements but it's not committing to them. Things that would normally get a GenZ eyeroll would likely slip past them because it's not really old-man-yelling-at-clouds.
Director Verbinski is known for being a visual stylist on The Ring and Pirates of the Carribean movies, and there's no doubt this is a film that looks a lot better than its twenty million dollar budget. But whatever style Verbinski brings is top loaded in a way, with some exceptionally interesting and well composed shots calling attention to themselves in the film's opening sequence and then seemingly falling away for the rest of the film (perhaps intricate compositions take time which costs money?).
I like both the main story and the flashbacks and they do all connect, but they almost feel like they should be separate pieces. There's probably a whole 90-minute "one crazy night" story in just the team getting from point A to point B, but the flashbacks interrupt that flow (and the lack of Rockwell in them is to their greatest detriment). Each of these microstories could have possibly supported their own feature, or maybe this could have been a multi-part anthology rather than a movie.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is solidly entertaining, but I imagine I'll have largely forgotten about it in a few months.
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So imagine my surprise when I get to the next "Tales for all"* film on the list, Summer of the Colt, which turns out to be a horse-centric family drama. I think what appeals to me even less than a dramatic film is a dramatic film centered around horses. Black Beauty or The Black Stallion, no thank you.
(*"Tales for all" being the series of family films made by Quebec producer Rock Demers, the earliest of its installments which were mainstays on Canadian weekend afternoon television through much of the 1980's and 1990's)
So it's no surprise to me that I found the first half of this film to be nearly interminable. The set-up finds Laura, Daniel and Felipe visiting their Grandfather's horse ranch in Argentina. They're met by their young friend Martin, whose family lives and works on the ranch. But Laura is a young woman now, and not as interested in playing as the boys. There's horse riding aplenty and kids being kids and it's all so tranquil and kind of pointless for what seems like forever.
It should also be mentioned that this is an Argentinian co-production with Demers, and it was most likely filmed in Spanish as both the English and French dubs do not sync with the performers' mouths. It's an obstacle. Also an obstacle, as we find with most of the "Tales for all" is the child actors are not the most seasoned performers and a lot of their performances can be very stilted and/or conveying incorrect emotion. The English dub voice performers are pretty solid though, but all this is barriers to enjoyment. It's important to establish all this film had going against it, because, in the end, I actually quite liked it overall.
What builds slowly in the film is Laura's sensing hostility from her Grandfather. He loved her just last year and now he's suddenly standoffish, cold, and even mean towards her. She sees it as sexism, that now that she's blossoming into womanhood, she's not such a tomboy, and he can't relate to her. But he's also not trying. So she takes drastic measures to try and fit in with the boys, by cutting off her long locks into a choppy bob. Her Grandfather can only retort snidely "Well, I hope you're proud". The film sometimes presents Laura from Grandfather's point of view, and he sometimes catches sight of her and he sees an entirely different person. We can infer, based on comments made, that he's seeing in her the children's grandmother, who left for Paris and never came back, and it's too much for him to bear. It would seem one tainted experience with a woman nearly 50 years ago just turned him into an old misogynist and a control freak.
Meanwhile summer pals Daniel and Martin are having a great time chumming around, doing horse sports and such, but when Martin points out a golden colt to Daniel, Daniel falls in love with the horse and asks his Grandfather if he can have it. His Grandfather agrees, but only if he can break the horse in... neither Daniel or Grandfather realizing that Martin has already bonded with the horse and has been slowly breaking the horse in for weeks already.
It's a juvenile love triangle, but instead of a girl, it's a horse. Daniel becomes obsessed with the horse... some choice Daniel quotes:
D. "I've never seen a horse like that.... He's the one I want... Yeah, I want him for myself. He's beautiful!"
D. "Be quiet, Martin, he belongs to me!"
D. "you and me will do a lot together you'll see. You and me will go everywhere together...you're mine now."
D. "you had no right to let anyone else mount you! You're mine!"
Don't read these as gentle cooing, no read them as a steely-eyed psychopath, because that's how they come across (at least in the dub).
When Daniel catches Martin riding "his" horse, their friendship becomes a bitter rivalry. That is, until the horse bucks Daniel off and nearly kills him (for a second there, I thought it did, which I wouldn't put past one of these "Tales for all" to do), and then it's all bros before ho(rs)es. Well, not really, but the boys do talk it out.
The second half of the film spurts to life in full blown telenovela style. Just meaty melodrama with intense looks and leers, and heightened emotions which could lead anywhere. At one point Daniel pulls back his bed covers to find his grandfather has left him a silver-sheathed knife... a real Chekhovian play where we have to legitimately worry if this obsessed, nearly-psychopathic kid is going to stab another kid over a horse.
Laura's journey into young adulthood starts off as a real non-entity in the film, as Laura spends much of her time either alone or with her Great Aunt. But her delight in becoming a woman starts to sour because her relationship with her Grandfather calls into question how these changes in her body affect how others see her, it's a real mind fuck, and she doesn't understand it. She tries to get clarity and only gets pushed away. So the only way for her to process is through drastic measures and even those don't work. As coming of age stories go, it's pretty powerful at times.
Likewise Grandfather is not just this nasty figure, he's actually pretty kind, but also myopic and out of touch with his own emotional core. His relationship with his grandchildren is based on a foundation of control, and suddenly with Laura and Daniel he's finding his control challenged. They are children, not horses, as Laura reminds him, they should not have to be broken in.
The film's second half shows the character developing emotional intelligence, realizing that the feelings they have inside don't need to stay there. Talking about things is the only way to make a situation better, even if it's uncomfortable.
Visually, Summer of the Colt is perfunctory, it does the job it needs to do. It captures the horses nicely and gets those emotive looks from the performers right center of the frame in full melodramatic fashion. There's little fancy here, but it all works.
Next to Bach and Broccoli it's the most cohesive and resonant of the "Tales for all" but without a real genre hook, it's not quite as fun.
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