The Secret Agent
As an aspiring screenwriter, one of the lessons I’ve learned by reading screenplays, and watching a lot of movies, is that one of the keys to screenwriting is its compactness, suggesting a lot with a little. Which is definitely true. This is a quality screenwriting shares with short story writing, and to quote one of my literary heroes, Anton Chekhov: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.” This principle seems to me essentially correct, though all such rules are, of course, begging to be broken under the right circumstances. But something that watching The Secret Agent also reinforced for me: while every bit of a good screenplay is absolutely essential, no particular part of it needs to further the central plot, or even any of the subplots. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s excellent writing demonstrates that a screenplay can point in many directions, and that details that might seem extraneous can contribute to a movie’s Geist without furthering the plot. The Secret agent contains many threads, and not all of them get wrapped up and tied with a bow by the end. And yet the movie works beautifully, not in spite of this but because of this.
The basic story is that of a researcher in Brazil who runs afoul of someone powerful and important by sticking to his principles, and thus becomes a target of the violent shadow state of the Brazilian government in the late 1970s. There is another narrative layer that brings us somewhere near the present day, which speaks to the difficulty of attempting to unearth the past, the historical difficulty (piecing together fragments) and the emotional difficulty.
The Secret Agent has kept me thinking for days, which, for me, is always a sign of a movie well done.
Available to watch in theaters in some areas and as VOD rental or purchase on Prime, Apple TV, and possibly other services.