2025 Cannes Report Part 2: Politics
Speaking truth to power on the world stage: It Was Just an Accident, Yes!, The Secret Agent
I detected four major through-lines in my nine days and sixteen movies at the Cannes Film Festival: plagues, politics, the personal, and the past.
The films I saw have much more nuance than can be described in just a word, but for the sake of helping you understand what these movies represented, this is the systemized classification I've come up with.
Over the next three days, I’ll present these films and my quick thoughts on them—and how they relate to their theme
So let’s continue this four-part series, which kicked off yesterday with plagues. Today, politics:
In this edition: It Was Just an Accident, Yes!, The Secret Agent
Politics
Wim Wenders said that every film is political—and maybe nowhere is that more true than at Cannes, where you have a global stage to make a critical statement about your country: what’s great within it, and more likely, what’s wrong with it. Three films really took their nations to task in surprising, ecstatic, emotional, and brilliant ways.
The first and clearest is the Palme d’Or winner: It Was Just a Simple Accident from Iranian director Jafar Panahi. This strange parable of a movie follows a man who thinks he may have recognized his torturer. He locks him up in a box and pulls in more and more working-class Iranians who were affected by the purported man, coming along on a journey, deciding the fate of the man, asking themselves, should they kill him or free him, and what does it mean to exact revenge and continue a cycle of violence?
It’s a brilliant screenplay—one character smartly calls the situation (in a line apt for the film itself) a quagmire: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. There are farcical elements and some dark comedy, but when it arrives at its show-stopping ending, you really feel like you’ve gone into the pits of hell. This wasn’t my favorite film at Cannes, but it was near the top, and I’m really glad it got the Palme to shine more light on the political situation in Iran. A very deserving winner that I can’t wait for people to see.
Another one of my favorite films was Nadav Lapid’s Yes! If you’ve seen Lapid’s work, you know—he’s an absolute firebrand, laying everything out on the line. Yes! is no different. It’s a dark moral fable and a biting, insane, orgiastic political satire about a bourgeois Israeli musician who has the chance to make a windfall by scoring a brutal, barbaric anthem for the Israeli government
.The sick joke is seeing if he’ll compromise his liberal beliefs and values for the plum opportunity. Lapid is intensely critical of the Israeli government while also sympathetic to the mourning his nation is going through. No film I saw was more hot-button than this. We think of political films as being the crusty kind of thing the substitute teacher would pop on in history class. This is the opposite, neon-drenched and full of sex, music, and debauchery. I admired Lapid for screaming and dancing his way to truth, proving trenchant commentary need not be dry.
Maybe my personal favorite film of the entire festival was Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, starring Wagner Moura. Despite the espionage-sounding title, it’s really a snapshot of Brazil under dictatorship in the 1970s. It’s about a nation of such color and vibrancy and diversity—and how it teems with life, and how that life survives and thrives and enjoys itself amidst the dark political forces trying to tamp it down. This was one of the longest films I saw—two and a half hours—but it flew by, thanks to the amazing, vivid cinematography; Wagner Moura’s commanding yet sensitive performance (he deservedly won Best Actor); and a really colorful cast of characters.
What I loved about this film was just how cinematic it was—how it balanced tones and genres in thrilling, unique ways. It shows a deep love for movies—not in a self-suck kind of way, but in a way that understands that heightening the cinematic, leaning into the unreal or the silly, can sometimes bring you even closer to a story and to truth. Don’t get me wrong—I loved I’m Still Here. But there’s something about The Secret Agent that hits even deeper.
Tomorrow, continuing on with The Personal