We’re almost at the end of 2026 — well, close enough — and I’ve concluded that my favourite film of the year is still Kleber Mendonça Filho’s O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent). I’ll clarify by saying this is my favourite brand-new film of the year; what promises to be my absolute favourite film experience of the year is being snuck in tonight, when I’ll be getting to see Ken Russell’s The Devils from 1971, complete with all that missing, long-thought-lost footage, now gloriously reinstated and polished up in a magnificent 4K restoration.
The Secret Agent was released in 2025 but I didn’t get to see it until this February. I’d been dying to watch it ever since I first heard about it, when Peter Bradshaw reviewed it for The Guardian back at the May 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It sounded very me. And when I saw it, it turned out to be even more me than I could have anticipated.
I won’t spoil it. I will just urge you to watch it. It’s 2 hours 40 minutes long. It’s worth every second of your time.
One of the (many) reasons I love it is for a quality I’ve variously seen described in reviews and blogs as “novelistic”, “sprawling”, “meandering”, a “sense of pacing [which] occasionally edges [the] audience to the point of frustration.” I can imagine many people would find these qualities maddening; I can imagine people walking out of cinemas or switching the film off on their TVs or devices within half an hour or less.
More fool them, I say.
The film’s novelisticness comes in part from its delightful approach to what might be uncharitably regarded as its minor characters. I’d argue there’s nothing minor about any of them. (As Grace Pregent points out in her book ‘In Praise of the Minor Character: The Importance of Peripheral Figures in Victorian Literature’: “In short, minor characters have a major importance.”)
Wagner Moura deservedly won a Golden Globe and was nominated for (by which I mean robbed of) an Oscar for his leading role as Armando, a university professor on the run in 1970s Recife with enemies in high places and with a brace of dodgy hitmen on his tail. He’s SO GOOD in this film. SO GOOD. But he’s surrounded by a ton of good performances, many of which come from non-professional actors.
Mendonça Filho shows a breathtaking confidence when it comes to those figures in his story who appear on screen for next to no time, but who are conjured up with huge respect, delicacy, and care. He’s amazing at making judicious choices when it comes to the particular details he discloses about them, which hint at vast worlds of feeling and experience, without us ever needing to have everything shown or spelled out for us.
There’s Clóvis, for example, a teenage boy staying at Doña Sebastiana’s apartment building, home to an assortment of waifs, strays, and refugees. Armando, ever the academic, can’t help asking Clóvis the obvious question:
ARMANDO: What about you? Are you in school?
CLÓVIS: No, I’m not.
DOÑA SEBASTIANA: He arrived here last month, from Rio Formoso. Running away from his father and uncle. They wanted him to be a man the way they wanted. Clóvis is a man, aren’t you?
CLÓVIS: Yes, I am a man.
DOÑA SEBASTIANA: Only, not the way they want. So he’s helping me out here. Does everything I ask, waters the plants, picks mangoes, does everything. Then after the soap opera, he goes to bed. We’ll see about his school later.
ARMANDO (ruffling CLÓVIS’s hair as he goes out): You need to go to school.
Clóvis barely says ten words in the scene, probably doesn’t say many more in the entire film. But he doesn’t need to: from this brief exchange, we have been afforded an immense insight into Clóvis’s circumstances. The economy is stunning.
A non-Brazilian viewer will likely infer that Rio Formoso is not close to Recife, and that Clóvis has come some way to make his escape. A Brazilian viewer, however, would know very well that Rio Formoso and Recife are a two-hour drive apart. Google Maps tells me the journey would take 19.5 hours on foot. I’m tempted to imagine that’s precisely how Clóvis was obliged to make it. It’s even more heroic, even more tragic, even more compelling that way.
Wringing maximum impact out of a character with minimum page/stage/screen time is nothing new. Dickens was doing it nearly two hundred years ago; TS Eliot praised him by saying that “Dickens can with a phrase make a character as real as flesh and blood”.
Chekhov was accomplished at it, too, and he got better and better at it from play to play; of The Cherry Orchard, Nicholas Wright said:
“The character-drawing is concentric, too: the smaller the part, the brighter the colour. Chekhov described this in a letter to Gorky: over the major characters you can take your time, he said, but the smaller ones must make their impact at once. ‘Make one a smoker of strong cigars, make another a gambler.’ Carlotta’s first line is ‘My dog eats nuts.’ Then she’s silent for pages; she can afford to be.”
Deborah Eisenberg, in The Paris Review (Issue 2024, Spring 2013), said that:
“If you keep your hands off them, your characters are bound to demonstrate the workings of the world in ways that take you by surprise.”
That’s totally what happens in The Secret Agent. The film is jam-packed with such episodes and such characters, presented so casually that the inattentive viewer could easily miss any number of valuable points. (This is most definitely NOT a film for second screeners.) And the effect of all those valuable points is cumulative; as Mendonça Filho builds them up steadily over almost three hours, these fleetingly glimpsed characters tell us just as much about Brazil at the time, its politics, its dangers, its culture, as the main plot track with Armando does.
I’ll leave the last words to Jane Gardam, in The Paris Review (Issue 239, Spring 2022), where she observed:
“What I really believe is that there are no minor characters in life or in art. Even the gravediggers in Hamlet — you wonder what their names were. […] You have to love the hangers-on, and you do love them, in the end. You give thanks for them.”
Quite so.
