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I can’t remember the man’s name, or the year we met, but I remember the conversation we had. It was the early 2010s, at a customer seminar I conducted for my former employer, back when I worked in tech; he was a client, flown up to New England from the south. The world, we agreed over cafeteria chocolate chip cookies at lunch, while everyone else made small talk about the weather, becomes a far better place when people travel to places either far-flung or foreign, meet folks they never would have otherwise, and connect with their cultures and lifestyles. Satisfied with this accord, we shook hands, went back to the classroom, and recommenced corporate droning.
For the last decade and a half, I have wracked my brain to find the perfect turn of phrase for describing that brief interaction while at the same time properly weighing it as a key moment of my late 20s. As it happens, the Brazilian filmmaker and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho had that phrase tucked in his pocket all along like a kerchief: “You might have one of the best conversations in your life waiting for a flight with somebody from Oklahoma, or from the south of Italy, that you just happen to talk to for 16 minutes, and you’ll never see that person again,” Mendonça Filho told me in a recent exchange. “That’s the logic of life.”
The logic of life. It sounds mathematical and scientific to the ear, but it’s the primordial “stuff” of Mendonça Filho’s cinema, embodied in his latest film, The Secret Agent, where Armando (Wagner Moura), a man who is seemingly more than meets the eye, turns out to be more and less at the same time: not the slick, cool spy implied by the title, but a person attempting to flee grave injustice, though this description does no justice to the gravity of Armando’s circumstances. He is a father attempting to reconnect with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), and an academic who’s drifted out of his lane and into that of clandestine operations. The film…
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