Mar

6

2026

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): The Secret Agent introduces itself with an onscreen caption, “Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.” That sly understatement sets the tone for what follows. The film’s story mostly occurs during Carnaval, and Brazil’s multi-decade military dictatorship is portrayed as a phantasmagoric, excessive nightmare of corrupt festivity, presided over by a lord of misrule: President Ernesto Geisel, to whose portrait, hanging in government offices, the camera periodically and pointedly returns. Developing the Carnaval theme, the director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, mixes a host of disparate styles and allusions—gorey shootouts set to jaunty music; sudden lurches from the tape-recorded briefings in the 1970s to their reception in the present; a mock horror sequence of a severed leg rampaging against queer lovers in a late-night park; and a heartfelt, at times sentimental, drama of a family shattered by gangster capitalism and state violence. This emotional and generic pastiche renders the movie’s images of crushing reaction and corruption all the more powerful; the playful, drunken chaos throws the viewer off-kilter, so that we latch onto moments of sincere emotion.

The movie also frames the Brazilian dictatorship within longer histories of fascist and colonial violence. The protagonist, Marcelo Alves (Wagner Moura), is a university professor on the run from a rapaciously privatizing, rabidly right-wing businessman. He finds temporary refuge in a building run by an elderly anarcho-communist, Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), as part of a shadowy diaspora of the pursued and exiled, all with fake names. In a melancholic evening toast to the group, Dona Sebastiana recalls her experience in Italy during the Second World War, listing memories she refuses to narrate, whether because of shame, trauma, or just prudence. We see that Brazil in the ‘70s is merely the latest battleground in a global, century-long fascist war on the left, a ruthless campaign that not only claims physical victims, but also scars the survivors and erases the memory of its own brutality. And yet, “The Secret Agent” is somehow a hopeful movie, celebrating the archival work of those who cling to, reconstruct, and honor the past of a battered and fragmented resistance.

In one telling scene, the repugnant police chief Euclides Oliveira Cavalcanti (Robério Diógenes) visits a tailor, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor whom he mistakes for a Nazi soldier, and whose scars he consequently wants to ogle. The confusion captures how throughout South and Central America, the anti-Communist right often styled itself as continuing the fascist project. Here, even the literal disfiguration of Nazism does not speak for itself, but must (terrifyingly) be interpreted by those who can get it entirely backward. (The scene is sharp enough that I will forgive the schmaltzy touch of having the tailor exhibit a Chanukah menorah… during Carnaval?). Chief Euclide’s mistaken identification of the Jewish victim as the fascist perpetrator, of course, acquires a special, vicious irony in the present, when many Jews seem prone to the same ugly interpretation of our tragic history.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Gian Franco Rosi’s documentaries are as formally distinctive as those of any director of scripted film. There’s no explanatory text or voiceover as he guides us through the situations and places he covers. The images are always magnificent, without overpowering the message, however subtle that might be. Rosi’s new film, Pompeii: Below the Clouds, is a perfect distillation of his aesthetic, a film of extraordinary plastic beauty in service to a tragic message.

The titular clouds fill the screen as the film begins. They are the clouds that cover Mount Vesuvius, the neighboring city of Naples, and the volcano’s most famous victim, the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The clouds connect them all, and that is precisely what Rosi poetically, lovingly, and bitterly deals with in the film. What is the relation of today’s Naples to the city that once bore the name Neopolis and the destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum? The answer, of course, is complex, and Rosi provides it in all its complexity.

We see the ruins of Pompeii, the dead frozen in the poses in which death found them. We see archaeologists working at a nearby site, uncovering relics buried and hidden from view for millennia, working carefully to disinter them, cataloging everything about them in their notebooks. Everything for these archaeologists is nearly sacred. The same goes for curators at the national museum, wandering among the statues in the dark and examining them by flashlight, which, one of them explains, makes the details all the more visible.

Naples is a deeply religious city, and Rosi shows pilgrims walking on their knees or lying on their bellies and pulling themselves along. There is no commentary, either on the soundtrack or in the way the scenes are shot. Rosi is close to them and yet far from judging them.

And then there is the other side of Naples, a city as corrupted by the Camorra as Sicily is by the Mafia, and not just by the Camorra. As a prosecutor says: The whole city is a crime scene, for beneath it grave robbers have dug tunnels under almost every neighborhood to plunder Roman graves. The prosecutor and a Carabinieri commander helicopter around the city, entering the tunnels only to find rooms denuded of as many as twelve frescoes, Roman—Italian—treasures lost to the population forever. These tunnels took years to build, and yet no one knew of them or prevented the thefts. The thieves are, in a way, like Vesuvius, murderers of the nation’s patrimony.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt is a masterpiece of cinematography and sound design, viscerally suspenseful and strikingly beautiful. It is also morally repugnant, representing art at its most vacuous.

The film centers around Luis (Sergi Lopéz), a Spanish father who, along with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), is at a rave in Morocco to search for his lost daughter Mar. He doesn’t find her, but one of the ravers, Jade (Jade Oukid), tells him of another rave deeper in the desert where Mar might be. Soon after, a group of soldiers arrives to break up the rave and evacuate European citizens for unexplained reasons. As the cars are being escorted away, Jade and her motley crew of fellow ravers make a break to escape the soldiers, and Luis impulsively follows them; thus they become unlikely travel companions, heading together to the next rave.

Why exactly are there soldiers evacuating people? What is the nature of this war that’s breaking out? If you hoped Sirāt would answer these questions, you’d be disappointed. Occasionally, we’re shown a ploddingly familiar gesture toward global conflict—lines for gas which seem to stretch for miles, or military convoys passing along—but we’re never given an explanation for why all this is happening. At one point a radio mentions the impending outbreak of World War III; one of the ravers turns it off instantly, sparing the film any need for further detail.

Sirāt is not a film that cares much for particularity. Even at the level of characterization, it operates only in broad, connotative strokes: Virtually no detail is provided about Mar other than that she’s missing, because what matters is not really the absence of an individual with complex motivations and relationships with other characters, but simply that Luis has a reason to be forlorn. Among the entire cast of characters, there is essentially no internal conflict, and not one of them has anything that could be called “development” across the entire film. The effect is that when they die, their deaths don’t seem like the obliterations of real and individualized human beings, but more like tragedies of the most generic, melodramatic sort, where the victim is substitutable for anyone else.

These are not just aesthetic quibbles. What we see in Sirāt is the logical endpoint of a humanism allergic to particular detail, where even war itself—a war that may well be unfolding at this exact moment—becomes nothing more than a spiritual allegory, exemplified by the film’s increasingly ridiculous ending. Because this war is left almost entirely abstract and unexplained, it appears as ineffable, fated—and although the self-important may take solace how this very fatedness affords the chance of “crossing over” into divine apathy, it is worth insisting that war is no spiritual symbol, but something very particular, very contingent, and very real.

What Sirāt does well—exceptionally well—is its long shots and its soundtrack, which at times blend into a masterful translation of the repetitive yet suspenseful thrum of rave music into filmic form. It fails, utterly, in its attempt to portray the infinite present of a rave as a desideratum rather than a moral abdication. If you’re interested in watching a film set in the desert, I’d instead recommend Dune, which manages to be more politically salient while also featuring sandworms.

How could the Israelites abandon God—building and bowing to a Golden Calf—so soon after witnessing the miraculous plagues against Egypt, the splitting of the sea, and the divine revelation at Mount Sinai? The Rabbis are at pains to explain away their infidelity: One tradition argues that the Israelites were not truly blameworthy because they had absorbed idolatrous practices in Egypt; another maintains that it was really God’s fault for having given them so much gold upon their flight from slavery. These explanations assume that the Israelites make the Golden Calf in spite of experiencing God’s might. But the Torah suggests that it is actually the experience of God’s presence itself—and the vulnerability it entails—that leads them to idolatry.

In order to understand this paradox, we need to return to the moment of revelation at Sinai. Just after detailing the Ten Commandments, the Torah describes the Israelites’ panic: “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’” Notably, the particular grammatical construction “all the people witnessed” indicates a simultaneous action rather than a consecutive one; it might be better translated as, “Meanwhile, the people were witnessing.” At what point, then, did the Israelites beg Moses to intercede—after God had finished stating the Ten Commandments, or in the middle of them? Various commentators have noted that only the first two commandments (“I am the Lord your God” and “You shall have no other gods before Me”) use the first person; the third commandment (“You shall not swear falsely by the name of YHVH your God”) speaks of God in the third person. Perhaps drawing on this difference, a number of Rabbinic sources state that the Israelites only heard the first two commandments directly.

What was so horrifying about those first two injunctions such that the Israelites begged Moses to listen in their stead? If they feared the immensity of God’s presence, why not ask for an intermediary as soon as God began speaking? Maybe it’s because the first two commandments highlight the Israelites’ debt to God for redeeming them from slavery. God begins by declaring, “I YHVH am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods besides Me.” As the medieval commentator Elijah Mizrahi notes, God could have chosen to self-describe as the creator of heaven and earth. The choice of the Exodus, however, implies a demand: “By taking you out of bondage, I have merited that you be subject to Me,” Mizrachi imagines God saying. All peoples owe God equally for having been created, but the Israelites owe God an additional, unique debt for their liberation. The second commandment—the prohibition on idolatry—heightens the intensity of this demand: God not only wants the Israelites’ service but their exclusive service.

This helps us understand an otherwise confusing element of the Golden Calf narrative. When the Israelites fear that Moses has tarried too long on Mount Sinai and abandoned them, they cry out, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for we do not know what has happened to Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt.” Have the Israelites already forgotten that it was God, and not Moses, “who brought you out of the land of Egypt”? The answer, we might suggest, is that they have not forgotten their debt to God but repressed it: After asking Moses to serve as their intermediary with God, they have now convinced themselves that Moses was the primary actor all along. Though this, too, implies indebtedness, it is by definition finite, for Moses—as the Israelites emphasize— is only a “man.” And despite their apparent despair over Moses’s absence, their next proclamation suggests that they are only too happy to be rid of their debt to him, too. When the Calf is finished, they exclaim, “‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’” Now, they are indebted not to Moses but to a work of their own hands—a work that owes its own existence to them. They are finally free.

Why are the Israelites so desperate to forget their debt to God? More than anything else, the Exodus—and God’s invocation of it at Sinai—must have been humbling, even humiliating; the Israelites knew that they were not responsible for their own liberation, and their service to God would thus be a constant reminder of their vulnerability and finitude, no matter how powerful they would later become. But what appears like freedom from debt really means entrapment in the fantasy of self-sufficiency to which humanity has succumbed since its earliest days. Adam and Eve are tempted to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge so that they will “be like God.” The builders of Babel want to make “a tower with its top reaching heaven.” In fact, the entire story of the Exodus is set off by Pharaoh’s attempt to forget his own debt to the Israelites—and thereby, his own vulnerability. “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph,” the Torah tells us. Following a Rabbinic tradition, the scholar Devora Steinmetz notes that the verb “know” in this context suggests an active choice: Pharaoh had intentionally forgotten that Joseph saved Egypt during its famine. It is not merely that Pharaoh “forgets” Joseph so that he can enslave the Israelites but, arguably, that he enslaves the Israelites in order to forget Joseph.

Each of these fantasies ends in catastrophe. Adam and Eve are exiled, the Tower of Babel is destroyed and the peoples dispersed, and Pharaoh and his empire are eradicated. The pattern suggests a deeper political-theological insight: The attempt to repress our own vulnerability leads to our self-destruction. This argument is made explicit in Lurianic Kabbalah, which argues that even the divine realms are tempted to imagine themselves as self-sufficient. According to the central Lurianic narrative, God formed reality by pouring light into a series of “vessels.” But, as a later Kabbalist explains, “each vessel wanted to rule and receive all of the light and apportion it afterwards . . . but they could not withstand the light and shattered.” The vessels cannot bear their own finitude. Each one wants to imagine itself as God—to be the one apportioning light instead of dependent upon it—and thus they bring about their own destruction. Each sin since then has been the result of acting out the same fundamental fantasy.

Perhaps this is why the Tanakh instructs the Israelites again and again to recall their dependence. When they stand at the edge of the Land of Israel, God warns them: “Beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget YHVH your God—who freed you from the land of Egypt, . . . and you say to yourselves, ‘My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.’” And God commands that at each year’s harvest, the Israelites must repeat the story of the Exodus and declare, “I now bring the first fruits of the soil that You, God, have given me.” At the very moment when they will be most tempted to imagine themselves invincible, they must remember their impotence.

In an oft-quoted story, the Rabbis imagine God holding Mount Sinai above the heads of the Israelites and forcing them to accept the Torah: “If you accept the Torah, well and good, but if not—there will be your graves.” But, the Rabbis then ask, wouldn’t that mean that the covenant was made under duress and therefore not legally binding? The Rabbis answer by quoting the Book of Esther’s statement that “the Jews undertook and irrevocably obligated themselves.” Though the statement in context refers to the observance of Purim, the Rabbis reinterpret it as referring to the covenant itself. What does it mean that the Jews re-accepted the covenant specifically on Purim of all holidays, when they were, from the plain meaning of the text, saved not by God but by a combination of luck, imperial protection, and their own military prowess?

The medieval commentator Rashi offers a conservative interpretation that blunts the force of the story: The Jews recognized that their redemption was really due to God. Here, Purim is simply a repetition of Sinai—once again, the Jews are in debt. Some read the parable as a predecessor to a post-Holocaust theology: In God’s apparent absence, to be Jewish is an act of uncoerced choice, and all debts have been nullified. But there is a third possible reading: that the Israelites are not admitting a new debt (Purim) but rather recognizing an old one (Sinai); that no new triumph could override the fact of their one-time vulnerability, which in turn undermines any current or future “fantasy of omnipotence.” They are, in short, recognizing that even if God has absconded, they will never themselves be gods.

The US and Israel’s attacks on Iran are only the latest repetition of humanity’s compulsive attempt to repress this humiliating fact of vulnerability through unrestrained strength. Like every act of hubris since the shattering of the vessels, it is almost certain to undermine the stability and safety it purportedly seeks. But we should not make the mistake of indulging in our own alternative fantasy that those who sin will directly face the consequences of their own deeds, impaled upon their own stakes, to use the Book of Esther’s imagery. We are all living in this shattered reality, and we will all bear the consequences—those who will live amidst the rubble most of all, and those most responsible least.

Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.