Courtesy of NEON.

Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center (MUBI).

New York Film Festival 2025:

The Secret Agent/O Agente Secreto
Below the Clouds/Sotto le nuvole

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi

The timing of these three 2025 New York Film Festival dispatches has only gotten later and later, and I’m getting this in right before the new year, which in a way feels apt. Writing these words more than three months and over two thousand miles away from where I first encountered Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds—two key films of this year that exist in entirely different registers yet share a marked kinship—I can still remember much of the sensation, if not the specifics of seeing both in the Walter Reade press screenings. Granted, one film’s screening was much more full and has accordingly received something on the order of a thousand times more recognition, but both experiences were charged with a certain feeling of a continual awakening, one corresponding with both films’ ability to evolve their ever-broadening sense of place and time.

Only one of these films is by an established documentarian, but in an odd sense Kleber Mendonça Filho is the one to have marshaled a surge of interest in his past work, fiction and nonfiction alike. The Secret Agent is his first film in the former mode since Bacurau (2019, co-directed with his past production designer Juliano Dornelles), whose breakout potential was somewhat stymied by its US theatrical release coinciding with the pandemic. His follow-up, however, was the formerly too-little seen Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his second documentary after his debut/farewell to his past career as a film critic Crítico (2008). I had the fortune to see it and meet Mendonça Filho during its brief window of Oscar aspirations, with little knowledge of what was to come.

The Secret Agent distinguishes itself from all of Mendonça Filho’s prior films almost immediately. It is the first to take place mainly in the past, heralded by a chyron with a curious addendum: 1977, “a time of great mischief.” That sentiment, during a year smack-dab in the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship, is some mix of playful irony and sober summation that runs through nearly every interaction in the film. It accompanies Armando (Wagner Moura) as he drives to Mendonça Filho’s hometown of Recife in the midst of a certain amount of strife: a large number of Carnaval-related deaths, the discovery of a human leg inside a shark’s stomach, a lawsuit involving a wealthy woman’s negligent killing of her servant’s child. Though further blood will be spilled, and Armando is initially held up at a gas station by a suspicious police officer, it becomes clear that Mendonça Filho is most interested in the atmosphere of the city, using every bit of The Secret Agent‘s two hours and forty minutes to delve into all that makes up the city he has already evoked in Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius. While this present film does focus in on certain enclaves, and the former two films had their fair share of perambulation, the scale afforded here allows for the most vivid canvas Mendonça Filho has ever painted on.

To match, The Secret Agent—whose title is (once more, and in amusing counterpoint to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind) an ironic and yet oddly fitting for the star at its center, taken from a passing view of the trailer for the Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring Le Magnifique—operates according to a slowly unfurling narrative that can contain such myriad sights as covert telephone calls, bustling street celebrations, and a Holocaust survivor played by Udo Kier. Aside from saying the film makes it apparent that Armando is on the run from something, and that the main object of his visit to Recife is to reconnect with his son, it’s better to leave the exact details of his circumstances to be experienced. Indeed, one of the more potent cinematic sequences this year is a roughly half-hour stretch in the middle of the film where Armando tells his story to representatives of a political group in the room next to the projection booth where his father-in-law works, the only place currently safe for him. As he recounts his travails and flashbacks gradually intrude, presenting a long-haired version of the man the viewer has gotten to know over the previous hour, it thrusts the pains of history and cavalier oppression upon the viewer just as surely as it does to all those in the room.

Not just the room, but those outside of it as well. With the prominent use of the São Luiz Cinema, the resurgence of interest in Jaws prompted by the news item, and an increasingly important subplot that I won’t go into here, The Secret Agent reconfigures itself yet again as a film about memory—and in turn film’s capacity for housing said memory—one where every building in the city carries the weight of its past that in turn is in danger of being forgotten. It’s not for nothing that Pictures of Ghosts has been rediscovered and rightly hailed as a valuable precursor to this film: the few cinemas that he chronicled in that documentary that are still standing have received a movie steeped in the cinematic grammar of its time period, yet defiantly local and proud of its own heritage. After the fireworks of the climax, there is an air of wistful assurance that suffuses the coda, where the past lingers even among those who can no longer remember it.

That past is as present as ever in Below the Clouds, Gianfranco Rosi’s latest endeavor. Rosi presents a curious case in contemporary non-fiction cinema: by at least one standard, he is the most successful documentarian alive, having come within a Palme d’or of completing the Golden Treble—now that Thierry Frémaux seems to be willing to have non-fiction films in Cannes Competition, who’s to say what might happen. At the same time, his footprint is largely unknown in the US, with his previous, somewhat controversial Notturno (2020) getting mired in the pandemic and his Golden Bear-winning Fire at Sea (2016) barely making a splash. Both films dealt directly with topical issues—Middle Eastern war zones and Mediterranean refugees, respectively—in what has become Rosi’s signature, kaleidoscopic style, cycling between various unrelated subjects within a relatively constrained sphere of operation, comparing and contrasting their respective situations.

Such an approach is used to ever-greater effect in Below the Clouds which is no less engaged with the problems of the present yet situates them in a more discernible, nearly serene context: the city of Naples. The title presumably refers to the emissions from Mount Vesuvius, the shadow that looks over more than a million people every day. Shooting in black-and-white for the first time since his debut Boatman (1993), Rosi begins by taking stock of the place he and the viewer will inhabit for the next two hours with super-long shots of the city’s many buildings and the volcano, before suddenly tunneling into one of many increasingly disparate perspectives.

Even more than most documentaries, Below the Clouds cannot be talked about in terms of a traditional narrative, considering the polyphonic nature of its development and little individual rhymes. A brief recounting, then, of (most of) its key narratives: an emergency call center that fields serious incidents, fears over an impending eruption, and people who just want to know the time alike; police officers investigating a spate of tombaroli break-ins in what feels like a mild riposte to Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera; a group of Japanese researchers delving further into the ruins of Pompeii; a curator in the catacombs of a museum, looking over the statues and other material; a shopkeeper who opens his doors to watch over a number of students as they study various topics; and, in something of a coup of topical issues, a cargo ship staffed by Syrians who deliver grain picked up from Odesa, Ukraine. Woven throughout these are shots from within a metro train winding through the city and shots within a decaying, empty cinema as scenes from films related to Naples play on the screen: Journey to Italy is easily the most prominent of these, though I think I also saw the 1913 silent film The Last Days of Pompeii; at least one appears to be an industrial documentary.

Many of these storylines are of sufficient interest that an entire (albeit shorter) documentary could be made about each of them, but Below the Clouds is most in thrall to the push-pull of the past and present, the way a textbook entry about Pompeii formerly being a major trader of grain in the shopkeeper narrative can suddenly illuminate the cargo ship story, or the continual eeriness of watching people interact almost interchangeably with statues and people volcanically sealed into stasis. Sometimes Rosi can be a bit too eager to dot his i’s, like in one scene in the museum where the curator muses about how being in an especially dark and statue-filled room feels like stepping into the past. But the beauty of his digital images, with flashlight beams cutting through darkness and fragmented shots of the city lit up at night, only enhances the feeling of a film, like The Secret Agent, which belongs to a city out of time.