Happyend

 

how the security system sees the students

Writer/director Neo Sora

director on the set

Music Research Club

HAPPYEND              B                                                                                                           Japan  USA  Singapore  Great Britain  (113 mi)  2024  d: Neo Sora

The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo.  Something big is about to change.     —opening screen innertitle

One day, a school teacher                                                                                                    Lectured before his students                                                                                                        “If you don’t get 100 points in the test                                                                                            You won’t become worthy people”                                                                                                  Eat shit and die!                                                                                                                            Eat shit and die!                                                                                                                              The most important thing in the world is a computer.

—Eat Shit and Die, a protest song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu, 1969

Made by the son of legendary film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sora was born in New York, raised in both New York and Tokyo, graduating from Philosophy and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, he is a filmmaker and installation artist, where this film grew out of a writer’s workshop at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Director’s Lab.  Having gone to a Quaker school from fourth grade through high school, Sora was anything but a rebel, so this subject may have held a special appeal for him.  Something of a throwback to Takeshi Kitano’s KIDS RETURN (1996), Toshiaki Toyoda’s Blue Spring (Aoi haru) (2001), or Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), though not really a marked improvement on any of those films, while more recently Japanese films have offered political critiques through social realism, like Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) (2018), or South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho with his Oscar-winning Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019).  Yet this is a colder more sterile existence of a high school film set in the near future of a dystopian Tokyo, where the streets are always eerily empty, continually under the constant threat of emergency earthquake alerts, with a familiar student musical chant reminding us, “The most important thing in the world is a computer,” which is part of the Eat Shit and Die protest song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu that was banned in the late 60’s for its political content.  Basically a film that shows what it means to be a young person growing up in Japan today, this technologically forward world is a reminder of how easily it is to lose our humanity in the advancing pursuit of progress, as we tend to forget the bonds that tie us all together.  This film is far more politicized, though viewed from a disgruntled youth point of view, where authority figures tend to be far-right with fascist and xenophobic tendencies, demeaning foreigners as not really being Japanese, which has an overly divisive way of being racist and demeaning, with the government projecting messages onto the clouds, where the sky itself is turned into an advertising billboard.  While policy decisions start at the top, they have a way of being felt even in high school, which is a social stratosphere unto itself, with the film challenging the commonly held assumptions about Japan as harmonious, homogeneous, and traditional, where there’s a sense of dread and doom that pervades the film mixed with the joy and energy of youth.  Essentially a coming-of-age story as we follow two high school students on the verge of graduation, as the film's plot revolves around the personal friendship between two characters who struggle over their differences on how they view the world around them, the mischievous Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), always wearing headphones around his neck, who comes from a more privileged background, and the brooding Kou (model and track and field athlete Yukito Hidaka), who is a “Special Permanent Resident,” a 4th generation Zainichi Korean living in Japan (Zainichi Koreans in Japan: Exploring the Ethnic Minority's ...), two childhood friends since kindergarten that go everywhere together.  With aspirations of becoming a DJ, often seen stealing school musical equipment, they hang with a musically-inspired clique of five that includes class clown Ata-Chan (Yûta Hayashi) and half-Chinese Ming (Shina Peng), who eventually become a couple, and a lone black character in Tomu (Arazi), rare in Asian films, whose father was black American, becoming something of a diplomatic peacemaker in all their squabbles before heading off to college in America and reluctantly leaving his friends behind.

Coming from a director who has shown an admiration for films like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), Sora takes his own read on the contemporary sociopolitical climate through the emotional turbulence of late adolescence, and in doing so captures the intensity of teenage angst.  After sneaking into a nightclub to witness a muscular DJ in action (Yousuke Yukimatsu), where we find ourselves in the middle of an exhilarating light sequence for pulsating techno music until the police arrive and shut the place down, but Yuta and Kou aren’t done, as they decide to sneak past the guards in the middle of the night to play their own edgy techno music in a room they’ve designated as their “Music Research Club” (with a total of five members), creating even more havoc afterwards with an ingenious school prank, turning the Principal’s prized yellow sports car on its end like an obelisk, where it appears like an avant garde art display the next morning, with students surrounding it in awe and astonishment, wondering how they did it, and by who, many of them laughing with glee while taking pictures with their phones.  An infuriated Principal (Shirō Sano), a cartoonish, one-dimensional character who appears more like a villain, describes this as an act of terrorism (which he doesn’t really believe, but he uses this to justify his own nefarious inclinations), sending all of the students to homeroom for police questioning.  Curiously enough, the boys conveniently show up without their phones (hidden in a student’s desk), so their whereabouts on the previous evening could not be tracked.  It’s hard to make a rebellious youth movie with all the students dressed exactly alike in standard uniforms, dark pants or skirts and white shirts or blouses, where conformity is a behavior modification to produce obedience and acceptance of the prevailing moral order, but students always find creative ways to resist authority.  With Ata-Chan joking that he might want to grow up as a cop, as there will always be delinquents around, like Yuta and Kou, this produces an element of seriousness, as one of the more radicalized students, Fumi (Kilala Inori), offers a surprising comeback that leaves them speechless, “The cops are bureaucrats with weapons who protect the wealth of a country and its rich.”  This viewpoint appears aimed at the nation’s government, as the Prime Minister (Shunsaku Yajima) routinely goes on television with false catastrophic warnings of coming earthquakes, which is an authoritarian way of controlling the behavior of the public through fear, basically ingraining obedience, where schools use a similar technique, as Japan prides itself on how safe it keeps its society.  In response to the incident, the school installs a sophisticated, AI facial recognition surveillance system capable of identifying students and their behavior, capturing everything from dress code violations, leaving classrooms early, smoking, or even getting too close to another student, like holding hands or kissing, which is instantly reported on a huge screen in the building’s courtyard so everyone can see, students and teachers alike, immediately issuing point deductions which ring up like a video game, yet can prevent graduation or lead to expulsion.

Students react differently to the surveillance intrusion, with some instantly mocking it, while others simply ignore its presence and the over-controlling ramifications, where the film essentially becomes a collective struggle on the loss of freedom and the struggle for human rights against a repressive authority represented by their school, police, and digital surveillance.  When a Self-Defense Force military instructor arrives to a classroom, anyone who is not a Japanese citizen is forced to leave, like Kou, Ming, and Tomu, an overtly xenophobic act of discrimination, mirroring the views of the government, which relentlessly blames crime rates on non-citizens, recalling the Kantō Massacre of 1923 which followed a massive earthquake one hundred years earlier, targeting mainly ethnic Koreans who were accused of poisoning water wells, with roaming murderous lynch mobs fueled by Korean dehumanization and false government rumors.  In an act of solidarity, the Japanese student Fumi leaves the classroom with those excluded, openly defying the rigid authority, while organizing student protests that Kou suddenly takes an interest in, as he grows quieter and more pensive with the realization that his life is directly affected by the country’s anti-immigrant policies, where his family can’t even vote in Japanese elections.  Yuta, on the other hand, having all the economic and social advantages, defers, not wanting to derail his secured future, wanting things to stay as they are.  In this way, these two kids who have been inseparable forever, are on opposite sides, with Kou questioning why Yuta would never change or grow up, remaining emotionally stunted, coasting along on the privileges he possesses.  What’s happening within the school walls echoes the rise of an authoritarian police state developing in the world outside with the Japanese Prime Minister using the threat of a cataclysmic earthquake to grant himself emergency powers and seize more absolute control.  Fumi provides a list of grievances to present to the principal about the surveillance infringement of their rights, culminating in a long, protracted sit-in, where a standoffish battle of wills develops as increasing temperatures soar, where she is determined not to break ranks, even refusing the food generously offered by the principal, but instead he is humiliated into eating a wasteful banquet of food alone, with the students completely undermining his authority by ordering their own feast.  In this dystopian world, where the practice of reading books in their original form is considered archaic and old-fashioned, the film lacks edge and raw emotion, with no real distinctive look or provocative music, as the swelling, nostalgia-themed, 80’s style synth-driven orchestral music by Brooklyn-based Lia Ouyang Rusli, perhaps an indirect tribute to his late father, feels like a huge miss, never really capturing the rebellious theme or drawing audiences into what’s uniquely relevant about this fabricated society.  Despite the challenges new technology can bring into our lives, where it literally takes over, replacing human interactions, the ramifications only come more readily into focus in the scenes featuring Fumi, who is not even part of the original clique of five, who drew all the early focus, yet she is the most politically self-aware of the students, where her challenge to authority speaks to what audiences may be thinking, wondering how this could all come about so quickly, and with so little public resistance, calling attention to the global rise of authoritarian fascism (yes, even in America) in what were once considered the most respected and influential democratic societies on the global stage.   

Note

While the title may refer to the ambiguously optimistic ending, the band Happy End in 1970 was also the first Japanese rock band to sing in Japanese.

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)

 

Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho

Mendonça at Cannes

Mendonça with Wagner Moura

Mendonça on the set with Eugenia Alexandrova

cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova

THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto)             B                                                           Brazil  France  Netherlands  Germany  (161 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.

Winner of Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes, while also awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, listed at #3 from the Film Comment Poll: Best Films of 2025 and #4 from the Cahiers du Cinéma: Top 10 Films of 2025, the film is an elegiac portrait of Brazil in the late 1970’s, set at the tail end of a fascist dictatorship when political violence and corruption were rampant, a time fueled by murder and misinformation, which seems to mirror what’s happening in America at the moment, as we’re seeing this same recipe for authoritarianism being played out on a daily basis, with a President and his Party setting the groundwork for fascism by routinely dismantling the fundamental cornerstones of freedom, like freedom of speech, the press, academia, public education, research and development, and the arts, and then replacing them with a politics of silence, where one shudders to think about what’s happening out of sight behind the scenes.  Thoroughly manipulating the press and social media content, literally reviving a culture of racism, while systematically terrorizing black and brown neighborhoods, the President currently utilizes a para-military ICE goon squad, like something right out of Costa-Gavras Z (1969), as his own private army operating with impunity, answerable to no authority, with no government oversight, claiming they are rounding up immigrants, arresting and removing the worst of the worst when, in reality, 95% have no felony convictions, unlike the President, who is a convicted felon, guilty on 34 counts of fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal hush money paid to a porn star to buy her silence on his first run to the Presidency in 2016.  Much like a dictatorship, which is all about dirty secrets and concealment, that pretty much describes this Presidency, as from day one the immediate attempt was to destroy the structure of government and eliminate all watchdog organizations, while at the same time firing all the scientists, doctors, economists, and the PhD’s while replacing them with party hacks and loyalists, people who aren’t remotely qualified to serve in these positions, whose only purpose is to rubber stamp the President’s agenda.  The highly publicized, racially motivated immigration dragnet, largely in cities controlled by the opposition party, demonstrates a blatant disregard of the law both at work and in the courts, having a devastating affect across the country, as nothing stops this administration from continually regurgitating fabricated lies round the clock to the American people about what they’re doing, preaching that they’re making neighborhoods safe while routinely pepper spraying, attacking, and arresting U.S. citizens, journalists, and even Congressional representatives from the opposing party who question their actions and try to expose what they’re actually doing, as they’re continually seen slamming parents to the ground in front of their children, even pregnant mothers, before separating them from those same children, and then allowing them to die in record numbers (even greater than the Covid years) while incarcerated in abysmally overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, intentionally denying access to medical care which could prevent nearly all the fatalities (Trump Administration Deadlier for ICE Detainees Than ...). 

Every year films with a popular political slant tend to get overpraised, which is not to say they’re not good films, but it’s questionable whether they rise to the level of greatness.  This year those films tend to be dissident  Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadef sadeh) (2025) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s portrait of Iranian political repression in The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dâne-ye anjîr-e ma'âbed) (2024), as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s alarmist yet Academy-pleasing One Battle After Another (2025).  To those we can add this film, a classically structured tension film that jumps back and forth in time, concerning the inheritance of fear, the price of resistance, and the need to unlearn the forgetting.  Formerly a journalist and film critic before he began to focus on his career as a filmmaker in the 1990’s, Mendonça is the maker of Aquarius (2016), a film about a woman who refuses to sell her beachfront apartment to a developer, who wants to tear it down and build a skyscraper, so they try to force her out through increasingly abusive and violent means, and BACURAI (2019), a surreal Western about a corrupt and murderous scheme to secure water rights, both featuring the incomparable Brazilian actress Sônia Braga, while the documentary PICTURES OF GHOSTS (2023) analyzes how the city of Recife, the filmmaker’s home town, was once a cinema hub, and how the loss of its movie houses has reflected the city’s broader transformations over time.  This largely subversive work is a more vividly detailed extension of that film, where the filmmaker expresses his belief, “Fiction films are the best documentaries.”  The title is deliberately misleading and ironic, as the film isn’t about a classic John le Carré spy but a political refugee hiding in Brazil's 1977 dictatorship, alluding to his undercover life, the “secret” operations of the regime, and the elusive nature of truth and memory under oppression, with the “agent” representing anyone navigating hidden truths.  Fueled by Brazilian movies from the 70’s, like Bruno Barreto’s Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976), where a poster can be seen outside the movie theater, also Carlos Diegues’ XICA (1976) and Bye Bye Brazil (Bye Bye Brasil) (1979), they were actually made during the military dictatorship, yet coming at a time when a new political openness began, a certain liberalization of the regime.  Peppered with references to genre films, B-movies, 1970’s hits, and the very environment of movie theaters, the protagonist's father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is a projectionist at Cine São Luiz, the movie house of Recife, evoking a real character from PICTURES OF GHOSTS, though here it functions as a center of resistance.  Shot on vintage camera equipment in Panavision ‘Scope by Russian-born, Paris-based cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova, this film partially came about by the seven-year research of documents and archives for his film PICTURES OF GHOSTS, using that process to advance the storyline for this film, featuring a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles, all living in the shadows, like ghosts of their own existence, as they are targets for elimination, their lives erased by the state, revealing a legacy of chaos, havoc, and the horrible stain political violence leaves in a nation’s memory.  Never really knowing the type of danger he is in, only that he is being chased, what happens to the protagonist is left offscreen, only revealed secondhand near the end through a newspaper clipping.

After the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which authoritarian rhetoric and political repression became acceptable again, it recalls The Captive Mind (1953) by Czesław Miłosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, a blueprint for understanding totalitarianism, as it reveals the psychological toll from living under an authoritarian regime, transforming minds from within, literally losing one’s ability to think freely, making this film read like a silent commentary on the present.  There’s also an indirect message on the decolonization of Angola, the second-largest Portuguese-speaking country after Brazil.  A movie like this makes you appreciate the wonders of a working democracy, with a safeguard of protected freedoms built into the Constitution, allowing dissent as part of any healthy discussion, as democracy works best when diverse interests and multiple points of view are represented.  When those protections are stripped away, the effect is immediate, as there’s a corrupt lawlessness that exists at every level of government bureaucracies, where protecting their own interests is all that matters, irrespective of any harm done to the populace.  This film is like a road map into those troubling times, where the Brazilian military dictatorship lasted from 1964 to 1985 (Military dictatorship in Brazil: a history of violence), marked by state-sanctioned repression, censorship, and an artificial economic transformation, this 21-year authoritarian regime began with a U.S. CIA-backed military coup as a defense against erroneously perceived communist threats.  The regime swiftly granted unchecked power to dissolve political parties, censor the media, and arrest dissenters as they suspended habeas corpus, shut down Congress, and legalized torture.  Following a lead character, Armando (Brazilian actor Wagner Moura in his first Portuguese-language role in years), though most of the film we know him under his alias Marcelo, we watch him as he drifts through various layers of unleashed terror, recalling Kafka’s everyman character of Josef K in The Trial, who is arrested without reason for an unspecified crime, left in a no man’s land of suspicion and distrust, where the prevailing mood of absurdity is everywhere, as no one seems willing to actually identify what crime he may have committed, obscured by a vast, secretive, and inaccessible legal system, but the full weight of the law is thrown at him, suggesting he must be guilty.  At some point in time, plagued by guilt, Josef K begins to believe it himself.  Armando navigates his way through a similar labyrinthian network of bureaucratic traps, returning to his hometown of Recife during the 1977 Brazilian Carnival, described as “a time of mischief,” with nearly 100 deaths reported during the weeklong festivities, as in this chaos he hopes to reconnect with his five-year old son, Fernando, and escape the whirlwind of accusations.  Stephen Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) was in the theaters at the time, where just the poster alone scared the living daylights out of Fernando, nonetheless, he couldn’t wait to see it.  Entrusting his young son with his in-laws, he goes into hiding with a community of dissidents the government would like to make disappear, only to discover Recife is not the safe place he presumed it would be, suddenly finding himself fending for his life, where standouts include Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana, the elderly landlady harboring them, and Robério Diógenes as Euclides, a brutal police officer.  The narrative seems meandering and circuitous, with many forks in the road, making it almost impossible to ascertain just what’s relevant and what isn’t, which is like sifting through the strands of history trying to uncover what ultimately matters.  

The uncomfortable dialogue with the past and the present recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) in how it recreates a city at a particular moment in history, where the present remains haunted by memories, as the movie itself represents an act of resistance, accentuating the importance of the role media plays in standing up to authoritarianism, while it’s also notable for being the last appearance of German actor Udo Kier, who died recently just before Thanksgiving, playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor who is ridiculed by Euclides insisting that he must be a Nazi fugitive.  Told in three chapter headings, it has a novelesque sweep about it, meandering through an obstacle course of diverging storylines, occasionally getting sidetracked with what seems like dead ends, much of it feeling uneven, with sequences that go nowhere, yet at heart this is about the banalization of violence.  At more than two and one-half hours, it proceeds at a leisurely pace, slowly introducing a multitude of characters, becoming an ode to the Brazilian cinema of the filmmaker’s youth, never feeling rushed, and never in a hurry to fill in the missing pieces of a backstory, which only fuels the mounting tension, even managing to blend fantasy and black humor into this visually subversive political thriller, where bright, saturated colors act as a counterpoint to the dark, terrifying subject matter.  Several times we see the portrait of dictator General Ernesto Geisel, which hangs in the offices of the official bureaucratic authorities, yet outside of those photos, there is no talk directly of the dictatorship.  Instead there is an atmosphere of tension and authoritarianism that is established in the initial sequence, where a corpse is laying on the ground at a gas station, an apparent homage to Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), supposedly an anonymous man who tried to rob the establishment days earlier, but no one claims it, while also completely ignored by authorities, indicative of summary executions and the indifference of police power, making it clear that fear contaminates everything, and that this is a regime that weaponizes fear.  By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the viewer, the filmmaker dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end, but at best, it remains ambiguous, hidden under a plethora of clues that spill out, making it increasingly clear that Armando is the subject of foul play, as behind-the-scenes fascist interests have targeted him for execution.  Only in a flashback sequence do we understand that Armando was an engineer and college research academic with his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), living comfortably in a university setting, when his research is abruptly stolen and the patent rights taken over by the ruthless actions of private industry, which sees dollar signs in profits, making them both expendable, which is made clear in no uncertain terms, eventually targeting his outspoken wife, who dies under mysterious circumstances that may never be known (telling his son she died of pneumonia), making him next.  The entire film plays out on his increasingly paranoid wavelength, acutely aware of his frame of mind, where the beauty of the film is that it deals with surfaces that can be seen, while hiding the real motivations lurking underneath, where corrupt cops, paid informants, and notorious hitmen are on the trail, with what’s seen and unseen on a collision course with destiny, accentuated by newspaper reports that are infuriatingly inaccurate, printing misleading information fed by authorities, anything to take the heat away from the real murderous culprits.

Outside of Héctor Babenco’s THE KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1985), Brazil has been late in dealing with this ugly part of their history.  Apparently part of the population is still unaware of or has fallen under a collective spell of Bolsonaro-induced societal amnesia from this period of Brazilian history, where this film works as an antidotal corrective.  Argentina, on the other hand, became renown for writing intelligent scripts exploring their dark past in the Dirty War (1976-1983), making films like THE OFFICIAL STORY (1985), THE MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO (1985), NIGHT OF THE PENCILS (1986), and CHRONICLE OF AN ESCAPE (2006), a time when 30,000 leftist sympathizers disappeared, taken to clandestine detention centers where they were tortured and killed before being dumped out of airplanes, dead or alive, over the Atlantic Ocean.  Expressing a fascination with the Brazilian cultural identity, this is a dense and ambitious work, written by Mendonça, which is not so much about the story itself, but creating an atmospheric environment of surveillance and paranoia, addressing the years of the Brazilian dictatorship with a personal, fragmented gaze, populated by a mosaic of interesting secondary figures, including friends, collaborators, former guerrillas, degraded soldiers, and corrupt bureaucrats.  There is no doubt that this is entertaining, filled with an underlying level of tension and suspense that drives the action, coming right after Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles won an Oscar for the Best International Feature with I’M STILL HERE (2024), the highest grossing Brazilian film since the pandemic, which dealt with the arrest and forced disappearance of a woman’s husband during this same military dictatorship, but this film goes off on a bunch of unnecessary tangents that seemingly go nowhere, perhaps adding to the speculation about how difficult it is to read between the lines of history, where much of the planted archival material is misinformation, making it hard to ascertain what really happened.  Imperceptively jumping ahead to the present, there’s a lengthy sequence near the end of modern day university student researchers scouring the secretly recorded material of the times in search of unraveling the truth, including Flávia (Laura Lufési) who fixates on Marcelo’s audio tapes, as the story advances, halts, gets sidetracked, and discovers new revelations much as she unearths these new details, but it’s unclear who they are working for, what their aims may be, and who is funding their research.  There are a lot of assumptions in this film, with nothing ever spelled out, leaving giant gaps in the story, where it’s easy to speculate and come up with our own theories, but the emphasis is not on exactly what happened, rather why it was covered up, and what this means in our current political landscape where authorities are doing exactly the same thing, using the highest echelons of power to obscure the truth, erase history, while feeding incessant lies to the media, making it almost impossible to ever know what is really going on.  This lack of transparency is at the heart of every authoritarian government, using all available technological advantages to obstruct the truth, making a science of cover-ups and obfuscation, continually misleading the public until all that’s left are the layer of lies which are meant to protect the powerful forces behind the scenes, most of whom we will never really know, or just what crimes they got away with.  Never really delving under the surface at the root cause of any of this, Mendonça’s film unearths the blueprint for how it gets done, revealing the extent of the infiltration in every branch of governmental authority, and the murderous lengths they are willing to go to protect the private financial interests of wealthy Brazilian business elites, as they are literally stealing massive funds from an unsuspecting public that hasn’t the means to protect themselves from this kind of insidious criminal operation under the guise of government, leaving behind a legacy of trauma and inequality that persists today.

Note

“I'm calling from the future. Fascism is still around.”  An Internet meme on X by Carlos Aguilar