https://www.sabzian.be/text/19-december-2025-0

19 December, 2025

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)

VERTAALD DOOR TRANSLATED BY TRADUIT PAR Trevor Perri

In The Secret Agent, the latest film by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, the main character leaves the cinema during a screening and steps almost seamlessly into a street party. Marcelo, who lives under the alias Armando, is a dissident professor in the dictatorially ruled Brazil of the 1970s. Fleeing a planned assassination attempt, he chooses the cinema as a hiding place to hunker down and consider his next moves. Mendonça Filho’s choice of the cinema is more than just a striking detail.

When leaving the cinema, we see no foyer, no threshold, no reorientation whatsoever. The light from the screen gives way to that of the city. The contrast is quite striking with Studio Skoop in Ghent, the cinema where I saw the film on a cold December evening. Skoop’s large, classic foyer, visible from far away, feels like a gateway to the movie theater, with a small ticket booth that seems to officially welcome you. In The Secret Agent, on the other hand, the cinema and the world merge for a moment through a single door, as if the film and city life belong to a single continuum.

The scene only really gains significance when you situate The Secret Agent within Mendonça Filho’s relationship to Recife, the Brazilian city where he grew up, lives, and which forms the backdrop for almost all of his films. Many elements and characters are familiar from earlier work, especially Retratos Fantasmas [Pictures of Ghosts] (2023), his declaration of love to Recife and its movie theaters. There we see the São Luiz again, one of the last grand cinémas in the city center, with its distinctive back door. Built in 1952 on the site of a colonial British church, the theater is not a neutral projection space but an urban hub, a “temple,” as Mendonça Filho calls it. Other cinemas in Recife have since been converted back into churches or repurposed as commercial spaces, but the São Luiz remains for now.

The cinema where I was is also now being threatened with closure. Since it opened in 1970, Studio Skoop has been more than just a movie theater: it’s been a meeting place, with a film café, performances, and close ties to Ghent’s nightlife. In 1982, the cinema already seemed to be on the verge of closing its doors. The fact that it’s now back at that point shows how precarious such places have become. In Retratos Fantasmas, Mendonça Filho calls the São Luiz a “public cinema,” a term that reveals that some theaters are more private than others. That is precisely what is at stake in the takeover battle surrounding Studio Skoop. The Ghent city council has already made it clear that it’s not the city's job to run a movie theater. But why not?

As the scene in The Secret Agent shows, city life doesn’t stop at the cinema door, and conversely, you take the film back out onto the street with you. In what is perhaps the most famous text about leaving the cinema, Roland Barthes describes that moment as the awakening of a “sleeping cat” from hypnosis, in which he “perceives the oldest of powers: healing.”1 Mendonça Filho also emphasizes this when, in a conversation with Cahiers du Cinéma about The Secret Agent, he talks about the importance of that “exit” as a carnivalesque transition: "My films give the impression that they are unmasking themselves. That transgression, in Retratos Fantasmas, corresponds to the threshold of the cinema: you step out of the theater and feel the warm air of the street, the stench of urine or the sewers, the cigarette smoke, and you return to reality. It’s a sensation I've often experienced during carnival.”2

Retratos Fantasmas beautifully illustrates how Mendonça Filho wants to ground his cinema in the city. It originated indoors, with a series of self-produced films. Only gradually did he turn his lens on Recife. Familiar faces and places appear in his early work and later return in his fiction films: the same table, the same doors, even the neighbors’ dog, which continues to haunt his cinema like a ghost. Cinephilia thus becomes as much a love of spaces as it is of films. Retratos Fantasmas searches for traces in the now dilapidated city center, once littered with movie posters and marked by an iconography that made cinema visible in the streetscape. The desire for a public cinema, whether in Recife or Ghent, therefore also implies that cinema is given the space to be present in city life.

At the end of Retratos Fantasmas, Mendonça Filho shows in an almost clumsy way how fiction and reality intertwine. In one of the final scenes, he gets into a taxi. The driver claims that he sometimes becomes invisible, and moments later, that’s exactly what happens. Suddenly, the taxi cab is haunted. Cinema pulls off a cheap trick, and Mendonça Filho can only giggle. The Secret Agent ends almost like a mirror image: in a blood bank that used to be a cinema. The formerly magical space has been reduced to a clinical environment. No spectators watching fake blood flow like in Jaws (the film that runs like a thread through The Secret Agent) but people donating their own blood. The magic of cinema has given way to a functional reality. It raises the question of how cinemas can once again become “habitable places.”

  • 1

    Roland Barthes, “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications 23 (1975): 104.

  • 2

    Charlotte Garson, “Une archive à ciel ouvert. Entretien avec Kleber Mendonça Filo”, Cahiers du cinéma 826 (December 2025), 34.

Image from The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)

ONE DAY, A FILM
NL EN
In Passage, Sabzian invites film critics, authors, filmmakers and spectators to send a text or fragment on cinema that left a lasting impression.
Pour Passage, Sabzian demande à des critiques de cinéma, auteurs, cinéastes et spectateurs un texte ou un fragment qui les a marqués.
In Passage vraagt Sabzian filmcritici, auteurs, filmmakers en toeschouwers naar een tekst of een fragment dat ooit een blijvende indruk op hen achterliet.
The Prisma section is a series of short reflections on cinema. A Prisma always has the same length – exactly 2000 characters – and is accompanied by one image. It is a short-distance exercise, a miniature text in which one detail or element is refracted into the spectrum of a larger idea or observation.
La rubrique Prisma est une série de courtes réflexions sur le cinéma. Tous les Prisma ont la même longueur – exactement 2000 caractères – et sont accompagnés d'une seule image. Exercices à courte distance, les Prisma consistent en un texte miniature dans lequel un détail ou élément se détache du spectre d'une penséée ou observation plus large.
De Prisma-rubriek is een reeks korte reflecties over cinema. Een Prisma heeft altijd dezelfde lengte – precies 2000 tekens – en wordt begeleid door één beeld. Een Prisma is een oefening op de korte afstand, een miniatuurtekst waarin één detail of element in het spectrum van een grotere gedachte of observatie breekt.
Jacques Tati once said, “I want the film to start the moment you leave the cinema.” A film fixes itself in your movements and your way of looking at things. After a Chaplin film, you catch yourself doing clumsy jumps, after a Rohmer it’s always summer, and the ghost of Akerman undeniably haunts the kitchen. In this feature, a Sabzian editor takes a film outside and discovers cross-connections between cinema and life.
Jacques Tati once said, “I want the film to start the moment you leave the cinema.” A film fixes itself in your movements and your way of looking at things. After a Chaplin film, you catch yourself doing clumsy jumps, after a Rohmer it’s always summer, and the ghost of Akerman undeniably haunts the kitchen. In this feature, a Sabzian editor takes a film outside and discovers cross-connections between cinema and life.
Jacques Tati zei ooit: “Ik wil dat de film begint op het moment dat je de cinemazaal verlaat.” Een film zet zich vast in je bewegingen en je manier van kijken. Na een film van Chaplin betrap je jezelf op klungelige sprongen, na een Rohmer is het altijd zomer en de geest van Chantal Akerman waart onomstotelijk rond in de keuken. In deze rubriek neemt een Sabzian-redactielid een film mee naar buiten en ontwaart kruisverbindingen tussen cinema en leven.

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