A producer with a shaved head wore these atrocious, tent-sized tuxedo pants prior to this afternoon’s Directors Fortnight screening of Lucky Lu.

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.

I have an 11:15 am screening of Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s The Secret Agent (158 minutes) breathing down my neck, but I can at least file brief reactions to films I haven’t yet posted about, etc.

1. It’s not important or even noteworthy, trust me, to explain the plotline of Wes Anderson‘s exactingly composed The Pheonician Scheme. Because it’s just (stop me if you’ve heard this before) another serving of immaculate style mixed with ironic, bone-dry humor — another signature tableau exercise in WesWorld stuff — wit, whimsy, staccato dialogue, a darkly humorous attitude, faintly detectable emotional peek-outs. Plus the usual symmetrical framings, immaculate and super-specific production design and the Anderson troupe reciting their lines just so.

I’ve written repeatedly over the last couple of decades that Wes needs to recover or re-charge that old Bottle Rocket / Rushmore spirit and somehow climb out of that fastidiously maintained Andersonville aesthetic and, you know, open himself up to more of the good old rough and tumble. Maybe there’s no remedy. Maybe we’re all just stuck in our grooves and that’s that. What’s that Jean Anouilh line from Becket? “I’m afraid we can only do, absurdly, what it has been given to us to do. Right to the end.”

2. Dominik Moll‘s Dossier 137 is a sane, sensible, mid-level drama about an internal investigation of an incident in which a young yellowjacket protestor was seriously injured by a Parisian policeman during a back-and-forth. Lea Drucker plays the chief investigator for the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN); she is tasked with figuring out which cops, if any, acted rashly or irresponsibly. I felt a certain degree of satisfaction all through it, and emerged knowing I’d seen something of moderate substance. No harm, no foul.

3. Oliver Laxe‘s Sirat is a serving of raw 16mm realism, and yet deliberately made without attention paid to certain visual or narrative or logistical basics. 56 year-old Sergi López, an excellent Spanish character actor who probably peaked with his performance as the fascistic Cpt. Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth, is Luis, an overweight, gray-haired dad searching for his missing daughter in the parched wastelands of southern Morocco. Accompanied by his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and knowing that his daughter was a nomadic raver type, Luis shows her photo to several like-minded souls but learns nothing of substance. Luis then suffers a horrific trauma about halfway through, and his reaction is such that I inwardly quit the film without a second thought. I’ll explain later but what Laxe chose to show (and more particularly not show) struck me as intolerably bad filmmaking. I’ll let it go at that.

I have a couple of other films to get to but not now…

Joe Biden is not only a dead man in terms of his reputation as a liar and gaslighter who ushered in Trump’s election. He’s also literally looking at lights-out from prostrate and bone cancer, although who knows how much time he actually has left? A year or two? I’m not an oncologist.

If Joe hadn’t drooled and stammered and old-manned his way to abandoning his presidential campaign last July and had somehow, against all odds and in his dreams, beaten Trump, Kamala Harris would almost certainly be taking the oath of office by late ’25 or certainly in ’26…right?

Science Direct estimates, posted in April 2024: “Of all men with a Gleason score of 9–10, 34% were alive at the end of follow-up, while 43% died of prostate cancer and 23% died of other causes.”

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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.

It’s too late to bang out a review of Lynne Ramsay‘s Die, My Love, which I saw late Saturday evening, but I can at least pass along that while I respected what it was on about, the Debussy journos didn’t go for it. Too grim, too downish in a one-note sense, no plot pivots of any kind….just a downward swirl into Jennifer Lawrence‘s increasing postpartum derangement….down, down, down.

What is it really about? Just as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds wasn’t so much a restrained horror film about malicious winged demons as an indictment of social complacency, Die, My Love isn’t so much about JLaw’s descent into self-destructive madness as a portrayal of the dull horror of doing almost nothing with your life while caring for a child…an indictment of middle-class, stay-at-home-and-burp-the-baby-while-baking-cookies momism.

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?

…will go instantly down the drain, as this is a film that despises the sensibilities of Joe and Jane Popcorn…people will hate it, hate it, hate it. It will lose money hand over fist, and yet IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio are either ignorant of this fact or curiously committed to furthering Sound of Falling‘s myth regardless. It’s this year’s Women Talking….a spoonful of cinematic Castor Oil if I’ve ever tasted one.

One morning in ’74 or thereabouts I strolled into a Hollywood Ralph’s in a semi-ratty neigborhood…Beverly Blvd. just west of Highland, something like that. I’m striding down one of the aisles and….boiinnnggg! — I came upon Doors keyboard guy Ray Manzarek, whom I instantly “made”. I experienced a simultaneous jolt of surprise and pleasurable adrenaline, as I’d long regarded the Doors as mystical-spiritual brethren and here I suddenly was, face to face.

A typical Doors fan would have geeked out and done the old babble-babble, asking Ray about the drug allusions in songs like “The Crystal Ship” and lyrics like “I’d rather fly” and what Jim Morrison was really like on personal terms and so on. But I didn’t want to do the hyper fan thing or even try to engage Manzarek in a conversation. I didn’t want to be just another breathless idiot. So without breaking stride…okay, I slowed down somewhat…I just let go with one of my cosmic grins and said “hey, man!” Manzarek smiled right back and repeated these same words, and that was it.

I didn’t think of myself as any kind of kindred spirit of Manzarek’s but in a Bhagavad Gita way I sorta kinda was (or we were), and so, you know, two souls exchanging some nice, tingly vibrations in a supermarket aisle…the same thing would’ve happened if I’d run into Jimi Hendrix (although he’d been dead for four years)…move on, dream on.