This year’s Oscar-nominated international feature films—especially The Secret Agent and Sirāt—tackle what it means to live and die under tyranny.
In Sirāt, a band of ravers drive deep into the Moroccan desert searching for the next gathering where they can dance freely. A father and son impulsively join them on a search for a missing daughter, despite their limited resources and a vehicle unfit for the treacherous terrain. The last rave they all attended was broken up by soldiers enforcing a mandatory evacuation in response to news that war has gripped the world outside the desert. Later, as they’re listening to a radio broadcast, one raver asks another, “Is this the end of the world?” The other raver replies, like a cheeky punch line to a bad joke, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”
The speculative global conflict in Sirāt that writer-director Oliver Laxe alludes to in broad, elliptical terms stands in neat contrast with The Secret Agent’s granular depiction of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which endured from 1964 to 1985. From its opening scene—a shakedown of Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) by local authorities at a rural gas station—Kleber Mendonça Filho immerses viewers in a world of casual corruption and clandestine violence endemic to authoritarian rule. Anyone who can be cheaply characterized as “left wing”—academics, scientists, and members of queer and minority communities—are routinely targeted by those in power. The year is 1977. For the film’s ensemble of political dissidents, many of whom are on the run under assumed names, it’s been the end of the world for a long time.
The Secret Agent and Sirāt are among the five films nominated in this year’s Best International Feature Film category, all of which confront state-backed oppression. It Was Just an Accident is about former Iranian political prisoners exacting vengeance against their onetime torturer. The Voice of Hind Rajab reenacts the cold-blooded killing of the 6-year-old eponymous Palestinian girl by the Israel Defense Forces. Even Sentimental Value, a bourgeois family drama about an absentee aging filmmaker and his two semi-estranged daughters, pivots on understanding the consequences of inherited trauma from a tortured Resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of Norway.
Living with or dying under tyranny pertains to each of the nominated films, yet The Secret Agent and Sirāt are primarily concerned with the texture of a fascist atmosphere. Differences in style and tone abound, but both films capture the psychology of knowing that one’s fragile world is on the brink of collapse but persevering anyway in spite of overwhelming despair. Neither Laxe nor Mendonça are interested in peddling pat bromides. They recognize the disquiet of our times, and the unsettling awareness that the worst is yet to come.
Paranoia is the dominant framework in The Secret Agent. A former professor, Armando returns to the city of Recife to visit his young son who has been living with his in-laws. He stays in an apartment complex that houses other political fugitives and works as “Marcelo” at the city’s identity card office where he tries to locate information about his late mother. Though he struggles to remain unnoticed in his former home city, he eventually learns from a Resistance fighter that he’s been targeted by hitmen and must flee the country.
Armando’s struggle to escape persecution makes up the main narrative in The Secret Agent, but Mendonça takes the long view of his subject’s political situation by meticulously reconstructing an environment rife with fascist tension. His recreation of the 1970s Brazil of his youth—Mendonça was 9 years old in 1977, the same age as Armando’s son—impresses on its own merits, but the hyper-specific period design isn’t just a means to an end. The director understands that reconciliation with a country’s history demands a complete picture of the past, warts and all, because it’s the only way to prepare for an uncertain future.
Mendonça’s bird’s-eye approach illustrates the sundry interconnected ways that the dictatorship’s insidious claws sink into society’s fabric, from government through private enterprise into the public sector. The hitmen after Armando, for instance, were hired by Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a vindictive executive at Brazil’s major utilities company Eletrobras who holds a grudge against the academic and his university for using public funds to conduct scientific research on “electric autonomy” projects, such as an electric car. Ghirotti believes the cabal of communist sympathizers at public universities should have their funding criteria so radically changed that they’re forced to work for private industry instead. Recife’s corrupt cops—friendly with both “Marcelo” and the hitmen in an effort to play “both sides”—bribe a hospital employee to retrieve a severed leg found in a tiger shark that belongs to one of their victims. The newspapers, under the thumb of the cops, gin up a story of that same severed leg attacking gay cruisers in the dead of night to create a local frenzy that distracts from the authorities’ corruption and homophobic violence.
The coordinated, conspiratorial subjugation present in The Secret Agent isn’t on display in Sirāt, if only because Laxe focuses his eye on the people who have built communities outside of conventional society. Beginning with a group setting up an enormous speaker system, Sirāt opens with an extended desert rave sequence featuring a diverse selection of people gyrating to Kangding Ray’s pulsating score. Even before Laxe narrows on a group of five ravers—Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and Jade (Jade Oukid)—who chart their own dangerous path away from watchful military eyes, he demonstrates the value of bodily freedom within a like-minded collective.
Generally, Laxe leaves the details about the world beyond the limits of the desert to implication. The brief glimpse of soldiers directing the evacuation of partygoers suggests a general restriction of movement waiting for everyone back in civilization. Radio broadcasts discuss war in the broadest of terms. Even before the ravers heads into no-man’s-land, resources are scarce and profiteers have jacked up prices for fuel. The characters in Sirāt actively choose to forgo social comforts in favor of the Moroccan desert, which Laxe turns into an alien planet, visually recalling David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The remote, unsettling landscape implicitly presents two distinct possiblities—the chance to restart society in a wide-open land or, more likely, the site of an anonymous graveyard.
Laxe cast nonprofessional actors for his main cast, some of whom have disabilities (a prosthetic leg, a missing arm) and visual scars, all of whom present as nonconformists. He never exploits these physical differences (no one comments upon or others them, for example) but instead implies why these people might desire connection beyond a love of music and drugs. Much like the refugee community in The Secret Agent who depend upon a sympathetic network of anti-fascists merely to survive, the ravers in Sirāt have learned the hard way that traditional social structures were never designed to save them. They must rely on themselves.
The middle-aged Luis (Sergi López) has no affiliation to the rave scene; he considers the music to be noise. His daughter, Mar, however, sought refuge on the dance floor. Laxe hardly conceals the reckless, doomed nature of Luis’s quest to find her (mar, Spanish for “sea,” can’t be found in the desert), but personal tragedies multiply after Luis’s son perishes in a freak accident after their van rolls backward off a cliff. Later, the group suffers further fatalities when they improvise a rave in a section of desert covered in mines.
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Laxe successfully conceals these “explosive” twists until Sirāt’s second half; before then, the film assumes an observational approach to the opening rave and the warm chemistry amongst the ravers. Even at its most welcoming, however, Sirāt’s set of references reveal a harder edge. The visual legacy of the Mad Max films weighs heavily on Sirāt, with its emphasis on vehicles, the desert setting, and the ravers’ generally flamboyant costuming. The climactic sequence where Luis and the remaining ravers traverse a minefield harks back to William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.
Aside from the strong Abbas Kiarostami influence in his first feature, the quasi-documentary You All Are Captains featuring Moroccan school children, Laxe’s previous films haven’t signposted their influences. The Atlas Mountains–set western Mimosas and the Gallican character drama Fire Will Come owe minor debts to road film tropes and mid-century Werner Herzog films, but they primarily feel excavated from Laxe’s spiritual practice and nomadic personal life, which has taken him from Paris to Gallica to Barcelona to Morocco, where he lived for over a decade. Laxe builds upon that foundation in Sirāt’s milieu by foregrounding his love for New Hollywood cinema—mainly the existentialist wandering portraits like Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point, and Two-Lane Blacktop.
On the other hand, Mendonça, a former film journalist who grew up attending Recife movie theaters, has never concealed his voracious, populist cinephilia in his work. Urban thrillers and the works of Robert Altman and Brian De Palma linger over his first two features, Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, both ensemble-based neighborhood portraits set in Recife about deepening class anxiety. Meanwhile, Bacurau, his third feature, takes cues from John Carpenter films and 1960s and ’70s spaghetti westerns to chronicle the efforts of a fictional Brazilian town to repel a band of wealthy American tourists paying to hunt its impoverished inhabitants. Scenes of suspenseful action and gory violence neatly contrast with an anthropological view of the local culture, replete with psychedelic traditions and corrupt local politics.
However, Mendonça doesn’t express his love of cinema merely for navel-gazing. Similar to Laxe in Sirāt, he deploys it as a lens to explore his country’s history from the inside. It’s why Mendonça loves creating hangout films that often subordinate conflict, as much as they thrive on it. The Secret Agent is no exception: Mendonça revels in the luster of late-’70s Recife, filled with indelible characters who briefly convey their own rich interiority. His genre motifs give shape to his expansive design: the use of period-specific Paramorphic lenses, recurring references to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as a source of mass fear and entertainment, the history of conspiracy thrillers that haunt the film’s furtive dealings and covert payphone usage. A surreal sequence involving the invented “hairy leg,” which feels ripped from a forgotten B-grade horror lick, makes the uncomfortable implications of its bigoted corrupt origins go down smoother.
“Idon’t want to be in a museum,” Laxe explained upon the release of his third film, Fire Will Come. “The world is ending. I want to serve people and the community and invite them into our caravan. We need to be reminded that cinema is high culture but also popular culture, of the people.” While neither The Secret Agent nor Sirāt would ever be mistaken for mainstream entertainment, they both offer enough commercial appeal to reach American audiences and Oscar voters alike. The Academy has a history of nominating safe, stodgy films across the board, but especially in the International Film category. This trend has slightly changed in recent years, at least partially due to American distributors’ providing better access to a wider swath of films within a more globalized world. Mendonça nomination has special significance considering his previous two narrative films were suspected of not being selected to be Brazil’s official submission to the Oscars because of a far-right political boycott of the left-wing director.
Neither The Secret Agent nor Sirāt shy away from aleatory chaos and its corresponding victims; in fact, their panic and volatility feel particularly attuned to our modern shell-shocked psychology. Armando doesn’t survive The Secret Agent (though his murder appears off-screen). He survives in archival recordings and newspaper clippings discovered by a graduate student conducting research. Meanwhile, the randomness of the deaths in Sirāt are compounded by the absence of aid and the speed with which they’re forced to adjust.
Both filmmakers understand helplessness, but neither indulge in hopelessness. Their characters still find ways to unify as a rebuke against a desolate, atomized world. The threat of governmental reprisal bonds the refugees in The Secret Agent, with Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the elderly manager of the sanctuary and a former revolutionary in her own right, insisting her fellow fugitives raise a toast to “a better Brazil, with less mischief.” Laxe emphasizes the compassionate commingling of bodies as his ravers’ ranks shrink—the grief that initially paralyzes them also forces them to forge ahead, like Luis crossing the minefield in a straight line, a literal sirāt, the Arabic word referring to the thin bridge to paradise that sits atop the bowels of Hell. The bombs always hide in plain sight, both films suggest; the only thing to do is evade them or hope to survive their inevitable detonation.