Back to selection
Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent
Vahid Mobasseri, Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten in A Simple Accident Sentenced by the Iranian government in 2010 on spurious grounds to six years in prison, a punishment that came with a 20-year ban on making movies, Jafar Panahi immediately set about violating the latter. Title notwithstanding, 2011’s This is Not a Film was what I’d call an “actual movie,” spry and self-reflexive like his first two features, 1995’s The White Balloon and 1997’s The Mirror. The post-Film features that followed—Closed Curtain, Taxi, 3 Faces and No Bears—merited that first post-ban title more. Leaning upon his undeniably courageous status as a (since) multiple-times-jailed dissident filmmaker, those works foregrounded the director as a benign on-screen persona bemusedly interacting with the world around him, and the films followed that character’s lead: engaged only so much, restrained out of necessary caution in a muted aesthetic.
An unexpected and thorough reset (for more context on the film’s origins and production than I can pack in, turn to this interview), It Was Just an Accident begins, like many a Panahi and Kiarostami film, with a frontal shot of a car driving at the speed of a process trailer. Eghbal (Abraham Azizi) and his wife and child are having a flawlessly naturalistic but lowkey interaction when he accidentally runs over a dog; he emerges and the camera pulls back, dollying around with him as he walks around the vehicle. This is a new camera movement for Panahi, one I don’t remember him ever doing before, but that’s just a warm-up for an all-new visual language. The car breaks down outside of a garage, at which point Panahi—a master-shot filmmaker par excellence who customarily moves the camera slowly if at all—starts cutting faster than ever before; the simple introduction of shot-reverse shot has rarely been so disruptive.
The first character introduced isn’t the protagonist, and for 15 minutes Accident exists in an exciting state of narrative flux around who its focus could end up being. Eghbal might be a former Iranian prison guard and brutal interrogator; seemingly recognised by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) one of the garage’s employees and a former political prisoner, he’s kidnapped in a moment of startling violence but protests his innocence while being buried alive. To quell his doubts, Vahid stuffs the bound-and-gagged Eghbal back in his van and hits the road, gathering a crew of fellow former prisoners to help him definitively identify whether he’s got the right man.
Around that central ambiguity, the movie continually shifts between an impulse towards violent catharsis and a nearly equally strong drive towards comedy. The latter is prompted both by alternating camaraderie and friction between the ad hoc group, but also by outrageous levels of everyday corruption requiring constant bribery of hospital workers, gas station attendants and private security guards, some of whom have hand-held consoles and helpfully take debit. Because of the buried-alive plot element, more than once I thought of Blood Simple, which is certainly not a film I ever expected to think of in relation to Panahi’s gentle-spirited output, while Waiting for Godot is also explicitly invoked—a rare misstep towards the overt, but also an indicator of the film’s range, making for Panahi’s best work since 2003’s Crimson Gold.
Kleber Mendonça Filho leans into, rather than against, expectations with The Secret Agent, beginning with his customary opening credits deployment of a classic Brazilian track; his films are always excellent mixtapes. (I appreciated the additional unexpected use of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” to round out the domestically sourced classics.) Secret Agent sets its scene in 1977—“a time of great mischief,” as the opening credits archly characterise the middle of an extended period of military dictatorship and its normalisation of political violence. That disjuncture between tone and subject is typical of Mendonça Filho’s imperative to make fun movies about subjects that aren’t fun at all: gentrification and its casualties (Aquarius and Neighboring Sounds), class inequity and the brutality that attends the stratification of resources (Bacurau), the dictatorship’s violent actions and their present-day echoes in Neighboring Sounds and now this.
Secret Agent enters its sprawling narrative around Marcelo (Wagner Moura, who sports no less than four different hairstyles throughout), who winds up under unclear circumstances in Recife, Mendonça Filho’s hometown and the setting for all his films. Unfolded with the patient glee of a three-volume novelist firmly in control of his craft, the complicated plot revolves around the slow disclosure of who Marcelo is and his precise relationship to a shadowy group of corporate shitheads and other sinister authoritarians. Much of the film’s middle and longest section unfolds in the projection booth of Recife’s São Luiz cinema, one of the theaters whose history Mendonça Filho told in 2023’s Portraits of Ghosts. One of this film’s biggest surprises is making it clear that that documentary, rather than merely an archivally-based project made out of pandemic necessity and boredom, was research for this subsequent narrative.
As indicated by that unapologetic impulse towards grounding a very specific moment and place in cinephilia, Secret Agent is something like Mendonça Filho’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, an immaculately immersive and visibly expensive reconstruction of the filmmaker’s formative years. There’s one shot, a rapid dolly-back from a lobby, in which I spotted for all of three seconds an extra, never seen before or after, wearing a New York Dolls t-shirt; multiply the clearance on that by 500 and you get a sense of Secret Agent’s density of period texture. It’s hard not to be impressed by the totality of its reconstructed Recife, the purity of Mendonça Filho’s desire to make the world know his beloved hometown as well as he does and the confidence of his filmmaking. The end credits match the faces of dozens of actors to their characters and I was shocked to see that I recognised nearly every single one of them; no matter how brief, every speaking part has a presence that makes them linger in the memory after nearly three hours.
So, why do I like this film less than Mendonça Filho’s first three narratives? Part of it is that his characteristic use of extreme anamorphic lenses, split diopters or both in pretty much every shot is getting distracting; when everything is visually extreme, nothing is. And while I hate to sound like a development executive, the emotional core here eludes me. The film’s closing emotional Hail Mary did indeed land with me, but only because it entered around a Missing Father Figure—an easy way to push my buttons, but that seems irrelevant to the integrity of the film’s larger conception. At a length of 170 minutes (12 longer than listed on the official Cannes website!), Secret Agent also crosses the line between “pleasingly willing to indulge tangents” over into the “OK, now this is getting kind of attenuated.” Mendonça Filho is undoubtedly one of the present moment’s great narrative talents, possessed of admirable and justifiable faith in his ability to construct one striking setpiece after another, but sometimes too much is actually too much.
