Director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new slow-burning neo-noir thriller, set in 1975 and following a former engineer now on the run from political persecution in Brazil’s brutal, right-wing military dictatorship, will likely frustrate those who approach it with anything but a completely open mind. Filho’s work (Aquarius, Bacurau) defines convention, and The Secret Agent is nothing like a typical genre thriller. Even the title is ironic (borrowed from Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Magnifique, a low-budget satire of ‘70s spy movies.)
Our protagonist is not a secret agent. He’s an ex-academic. When we’re first introduced to him, he’s a refugee. He’s afraid. He doesn’t even carry a gun. And his story is not told through fast-pacing, constant action or easy-to-follow exposition. No, Filho’s new film is difficult. Methodical. Very slow at times, with many scenes pausing the narrative entirely to further flesh out the contradictory world these characters endure (a world of festivity and chaos, life and execution, and bright colours depicting the harshest degrees of torture.) There are sudden leaps across time and rhythm that require the audience to be fully attentive throughout. But if you do award the film that patience, you’ll be treated to one of the most masterful works of the past year. A film steeped in constant mystery, absurd comedy, gruelling tension, vibrant imagery and an intelligent exploration of a nation’s horrific past that most refuse to acknowledge.
The film follows Marcelo, or Armando, depending on who asks (with a career-best
performance from the brilliant Wagner Moura). In the opening, Marcelo is forced to traverse
the vast Brazilian countryside to Recife during the hectic and, in this period, bloody Carnival.
He refills at a gas station whose despairing owner laments the rotting corpse that lay there,
festering with flies and maggots, scaring off the wealthier families who drive past. A pair of
corrupt policemen pull up at the station, brush off the corpse and harass Marcelo for money, stealing all of his cigarettes. The opening scene is a film in-and-of itself, shrouded in the unknown, slowly allowing the tension to build, and brilliantly contrasting the saturated colour palette with the sticky, raspberry red of the corpse’s blood and guts. As the film plays out, Filho does not tell us who Marcelo really is, or why he’s on the run, and instead makes us endure the anticipation of some elaborate reveal. We think Marcelo must be somebody. And when the film quite jarringly cuts to the present day, where a university student, Flavia, intensely peruses audio recordings and newspaper archives about “Marcelo”, it’s clear they have the same expectation.
The theme of searching into the past to fill in the gaps is particularly resonant throughout the film. When Marcelo arrives in Recife, his protector, the small, rough-voiced Dona Sebastiana (played wonderfully by Tânia Maria), secures him a job at an ID card office, where Marcelo encounters the town’s corrupt police chief, who shields a petit-bourgeois mother whose neglect led to the death of her Indigeonous housekeeper’s daughter, and harasses a Jewish Holocaust survivor whom he mistakes as a Nazi fugitive (with a striking cameo appearance from the late Udo Kier). Marcelo uses his job to search for the ID card of his late mother, the only proof of her existence. He is left searching.
But when Filho lets the truth unfold, we realise that Marcelo, whose real name is Armando,
could easily be called anything else. His name is not noteworthy because he is not
noteworthy. He was an engineer, whose university was stripped and gutted by an
insufferable capitalist, Ghirotti, who then had Armando’s wife, Fátima, killed and forced him
into exile, away from his young son, Fernando. Our discovery of Armando’s true identity
coincides with him realising that Ghirotti has hired two hitmen, a bumbling father-son duo, to kill him as well. The duo delegate the job to a Pardo factory worker, leading to the one of the most suspenseful, captivating sequences of the year, a slow-chase through a market town scored to pulsing Favela music and photographed to reminisce punchy Kodak prints from the ‘70s (a fitting choice given the film’s motif of looking back to the past).
On the refugee commune, which includes political enemies of the state, fellow
civilians-on-the-run and two Angolan Civil War victims, everything is cast in secrecy and mistrust. Names are swapped around. Through shame and fear about their current state, most everything is kept hidden. There’s a beautiful moment where the band of outcasts state their true names to each other for the first time. Before that, another powerful moment comes when Armando, just after discovering his fate, leaves the cinema where his father-in-law works and, in the street at night, hundreds of people are celebrating Carnival.
Armando has no choice but to join them. The newspapers are filled with frenetic stories
about killer limbs on the loose and headlines like: ‘90 dead during Carnival’ (and rising). The police are corrupted. The military dominate society and wealth is hoarded by a tiny elite who hold the country to ransome. Even today, Brazilians are very uncomfortable acknowledging this period of history (less than a decade ago, they elected Jair Bolsonaro as president, an avid defender of the dictatorship.) However, everyone in the street knows deep down the country they’re living in. But even if they are nobody, and they could die at any moment and quickly be forgotten by history, their lives are still worth celebrating. She is Claudia. They are Thereza and Antonio. He is Armando. Or Marcelo. It doesn’t matter.
I could link The Secret Agent to quite a few films so as to guide your expectations. The
horrific political repression undercutting the daily reality of Latin American life feels heavily
reminiscent of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Crime pulp noirs like John Boorman’s Point Blank or
the quiet man thrust into chaos in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye also come to mind.
But perhaps the best approach is to just open your mind and let the story be told. Perhaps
that’s what Filho’s trying to tell us.
5/5
Image Credits – The Movie DB
