will likely be beaten by 'Sentimental Value' . Wrote out my thoughts (below) right after seeing it but have a few more.
Udo Kier's character is not pretending to be a WW2 Nazi. He is presented as a Jewish holocaust survivor but the police chief is too blinded by his arrogance and preconceptions to see that. That Recife (the city they are in) has been a jewish diaspora hub since at least 1636 makes this blindness all the more pointed. The chief treats him as a curiosity because of his scars which he makes him show. This fits into the film's narrative about identity and historical integrity. Armando is staying at a safe house under an assumed name while he works at the department of Identity Cards. Armando is looking for any records he can find on his mother and this contrasts to the end of the film where his son shows no interest in his father's story. He remembers little of his father but every minute of seeing 'Jaws'.
There are many other layers that play with this idea -- that movies and recording make things real to us while things that are more personal to us become the fodder of our denial. The scene with the leg attacking gay men in a cruising park pushed that dynamic as far as it could. IOW men who are going there anonymously and who don't want to be named become fodder for a sensationalistic news story about a disembodied human leg that attacked some of them. The leg story isn't true but it spreads because it covers for the truth and avoids having the actual attackers being pursued and held responsible. So this is like the main story. Armando pissed off some oligarch and the guy wants him killed because 1) he can have that done, and 2) he will never be held responsible for it. The class dynamics are very deliberate. Even the people the Electrobras oligarch hires to kill Armando use someone of a lower class to carry it out.
I think the film deserves Best Foreign language film because it is layered, timely, thought-provoking and unique.
This is my prior review:
"The Secret Agent" (2025)
Saw "The Secret Agent", "Cannes 2025's most-awarded film", last night. It is 161-minutes long (!) but it never drags. Set in Recife Brazil in 1977 it has the feel of films from the 1970s and includes "Jaws" in the plot and clips from "Omen". The filmmakers list dozens of influences, some which make sense -- 'Ikiru' 'Casablanca' 'Fargo'. And some of which don't make sense to me, for example "Close Encounters" has no similarity except that it is atmospheric and is of the period. Close Encounters, as we all know, was big budget Spielberg film that had government secrecy as a core element. 'Secret Agent' shows government corruption and dysfunction, very different.
IMDB: "In 1977, a technology expert flees from a mysterious past and returns to his hometown of Recife in search of peace. He soon realizes that the city is far from being the refuge he seeks.." But it is also about cultural memory as the son, in modern day, is shown to be disinterested in his father's struggles and murder during his early childhood but he remembers seeing the movie "Jaws".
It is layered as one of the hiding places for Armando is the projection booth of his father's movie theater. And they have intercut scenes of a researcher listening to audio tapes of the fleeing professor which evoke Coppola's semi-forgotten film "The Conversation" (1974).
The politics didn't come across to me. I thought Armando was pursued by the henchmen of a rich guy that he pissed off (true) but the film's materials insist that Armando is "a political refugee". I was a bit distracted by the Portuguese spoken throughout since it is close enough to Spanish to be unignorable to me yet not close enough for me to understand more than 40% of it.
Has a bit of everything I like -- dark humor, suspense, hommage to 1970s cinema, solid performances and an immersive landscape. There is thematic overlap with 'One Battle After Another' but that film is a post-modern mess where they let each actor pretend they are in a different film. 'Secret Agent' is OTOH well unified and focused. The suspense works because unlike the ADHD of One Battle, all of the characters in 'Secret Agent' inhabit the same world, with the same tone and you trust the storytelling enough to know that it will all pay off. 'Secret Agent' is closer to 'The Mastermind' – another excellent film from 2025.
= new reply since forum marked as read