Jeffrey Wells

I suffered through several mild annoyances while watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, although there’s no disputing that it’s a respectably “good” film in its own curious, unhurried, dark-fantasy way…a meandering, almost lethargic dream trip about living through a climate of political terror in 1977 Brazil.

It’s a half-solemn, half-eccentric ensemble drama set in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco and a sizable beach town, during Brazil’s heinous military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Story-wise it’s about Wagner Moura‘s Marcelo, a university researcher looking to reunite with his son while gradually getting wind that he has reason to fear for his life.

Alas, he doesn’t learn that a pair of assassins are after his ass until just before the two-hour mark, and that, in my view, is not an especially good thing for the audience.

The last half-hour of The Secret Agent (bad guy assassins, dodging bullets, blam blam) certainly qualifies as a Hithcockian suspense thing as well as an action thriller, but for the first 120 minutes we’re basically stuck with Marcelo, whose actual name is eventually revealed to be Armando, as he sniffs and laments and roams around and recalls his past and discusses the general state of things with this and that friend or former colleague.

The first two hours, in short, are basically an absorption and a capturing of Brazil’s unsettled mood during that anxious era, but with an occasional focus on gay sex and blowjobs (including the straight-person kind!) in particular, not to mention sharks and Jaws and a hairy severed leg.

It must be said that David Rooney‘s 5.18 Hollywood Reporter review of The Secret Agent has overpraised the shit out of this film. Rooney got me so pumped last night, only to feel crestfallen as the actual film unspooled.

“Enlivened by a populous, almost Altman-esque gallery of characters — way too many to mention — played without a single false note, and by the strong sense of a community pulling together for safety from the oppressive forces outside, the movie luxuriates in an inebriating sense of time and place that speaks of Mendonça Filho’s intense love for the setting. It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year“….calm down, bruh.

Oh, and I hated the color scheme…bleachy-looking in daytime scenes with heavily saturated yellows and oranges and paint splashings of fierce green and teal-blue…I was hating on this all through the 159-minute running time. Mendonça Filho’s mixture of oppressive yellows plus orange-teal splotchitude had me twitching with discomfort.

At an early Sunday screening of Harry Lighton’s sexually graphic, dominant-submissive Pillion, Lighton said he wants the film to “make you laugh, make you think, make you feel and make you horny.”

Translation: He wants Pillion to inspire erections.

Alexander Sarsgaard’s portrayal of the dominant Ray apparently earns him gay-friendly cred; Harry Melling plays Colin, a shorter “bottom”.

So Pillion is a gay Babygirl, only more boner-y or thrust-worthy or whatever?

From Ryan Lattanzio’s IndieWire review:

I just tried and failed to get into a 2 pm showing of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent (which I have a ticket to see late Monday morning inside the Grand Lumière), and now I’m seated inside the Salle Agnes Varda to see Raul Peck’s George Orwell doc at 4 pm.

But I won’t be able to see the whole thing (it runs two hours) as I have a ticket to see Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme at 6pm. If I want to avoid the agonizing Debussy balcony I’ll need to line up by 5:30 pm.

And yet, to be honest, I have a vague “problem” with the Varda. Or my eyelids do. The red Varda seats are so soft and cushy that I may wind up drifting off. I’ve caught a couple of great sleeps here before so don’t tell me. The body wants what it wants.

There isn’t a single aspect of Richard Linklater Nouvelle Vague — a concise, boxy, black-and-white, you-are-there reenactment of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless, 66 years ago on the streets of Paris….there isn’t a single scene or line or shot that didn’t strike me as wholly, deliciously authentic and note-perfect.

Thank you, Mr. Linklater, for nailing this…thanks for getting it exactly right.

For Nouvelle Vague is pure pleasure. By my sights, at least. Plus it looks, talks, feels, charms and shuffles around like Breathless itself, of course, and is about as joyful and immaculate as it could be in this regard — a genetically fused companion piece.

The handmade, little-film atmosphere shared by Breathless and Nouvelle Vague is the selling point of course…same vibe, same moves….both feel sharp, nervy, tight but impetuous, nimble, unpretentious — and are both focused, of course, on the same influential chapter in cinema history.

Guillaume Marbeck, Zooey Deutch and Aubry Dillon deliver perfect inhabitings of Godard, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo…they wear their characters well and fully, which is to say with grace, relaxation and confidence to spare.

Will your fundamentally clueless Millennial and Zoomer know-nothings give a shit about any of this? How many under-45s out there have even heard of Breathless, much less seen it?

Or roughly eight hours, start to finish. The Ramsay tops the list, of course, followed by the Linklater and the Peck.

As I only got about four hours of good sleep last night (awakened at 3 am by snoring), I’m heading upstairs to the press lounge. Maybe I’ll find a place to lie down for a bit.

HE tried reserving seats for various hot-ticket (5.21) films this morning between 7 and 7:02 am…sorry! Better luck next year! There’s a word for this situation, and that word is “bullshit”.

Thank God I was able to snag a Bazin ticket to a late screening of Joachim Trier’s film…skin of my teeth.

10:45 am update: I’ve been informed by the festival press office that a “technical issue” is befouling the ticket request mechanism. Tickets are available despite the software saying they’re not, which is quite an “issue” indeed.

Late last night I was toasting some pita bread in “le pad” (8 Blvd. Montfleury), and the heat caused the pita to crack apart, so it had to be retrieved. I used a kitchen knife to scoop it out….zotz! The entire place went black, no power, nothing.

No breaker box in the place itself, but there are several boxes in the hallway. Off, on…nothing. I texted with exclamation points and called the landlord….flatline, silencio. No wifi, no computers. Smart phone or nothing.

Update: it’s now 8:35 am and the landlord hasn’t called or even acknowledged the problem via text.

…if I didn’t admit to feelings of trepidation. Five minutes from starting time (8:25 am)…please don’t piss me off…please enthrall…please.

Earlier this afternoon I suffered through most of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, and I want credit, dammit, for toughing it out for just short of two hours. (It runs 149 minutes.)

A hellish, multi-chapter, visually dreary, narrative hop-around from the perspective of a few suffering women and young girls at different times during the 20th Century, Sound of Falling brings the grim and the soul-drain in the usual suffocating ways.

You could say that the soft, muddy, under-lighted cinematography is meant to inject the same shitty, misery-pit, lemme-outta-here feeling the women and girls are experiencing at every turn. Sure, I’ll buy that.

Is Schilinski an auteur — a feisty, willful, go-for-it filmmaker with a persistence of artistic vision and a stylistic stamp all her own (albeit a stamp that brings you down, down, down)? Yes, she is that.

Does her film have something to say? You’d better believe it. It’s saying that 20th Century farm women in northern Germany were miserable as fuck, and that the men were either smelly pigs or abusers or both, and that most of them smoked and a few had massive pot bellies.

Sound of Falling doesn’t make you think about dying before your time, but it does prompt thoughts of escape early on.

On top of which I was sitting in the Grand Lumière balcony, scrunched between two women and with no leg room at all, and my thighs and calves were stuck in a kind of purgatory, suspended between numbness and screaming pain.

But I didn’t leave for the longest time. I wanted to but I couldn’t be the first balcony-sitter to bail. I said this to myself — “no quitting until a couple of viewers go first”.

So I hung in there with the patience of Job, waiting for some intrepid soul to man up and bolt the fuck outta there, but nobody did for the first…oh, 100 minutes or so.

And then a woman got up and walked. And then another. Thank you, sisters, and thank you, my sweet Lord…glory be to God!

I stood up with my bag and retreated to the main walkway, and then decided to watch from a standing position. And then another person threw in the towel. And then another. And then a trio of Zoomers left at the same time. Hey, we’re really livin’ here!!!

I’ve never felt such wonderful kinship with strangers as I did at that moment.

Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Schilinski’s punisher.

I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.

Average Joes and Janes, trust me, are going to hate, hate, hate this exactingly assembled, artistically pulverizing tour de force.