Perhaps it raises false expectations to call the unpredictable, multi-genre The Secret Agent (O agente secreto) a political thriller, unless forced at gunpoint to choose a moniker for a film that defies categorization. It seems closer to a dark-humored gangster story told at breakneck speed. No stranger to nail-biting action and adventure, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacarau) puts all his cinematic cards on the table in a graphicly unforgiving exposé of the horrors of lawless 1977 Brazil, where human life is of so little value that people who want a killing done bargain with hitmen over the price, and numerous murders and disappearances can be directly attributed to the police themselves.
Set in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco in Brazil’s poor northeast, this fast-paced, imaginative tale unfolds during the country’s long military dictatorship, which began with a coup in 1964 by the Armed Forces with the support of the U.S. This is key to unraveling the ambiguous story and the characters, who have gotten on the wrong side of the authorities and are now protected with new identities and safe houses by a sort of pro-democracy underground railroad. One of these “refugees” running and hiding from death threats is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who returns to his native Recife, despite clear and present danger, to pick up his young son, Fernando, from his grandparents.
Told against a cascading mosaic of vintage movies, political cinema and genre tropes, The Secret Agent is a close relation to the directors’s Bacarau, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2019. (Actor Udo Kier, who was featured in Bacarau, reappears in a cameo role as a Jewish tailor who the police chief bullies into baring his horrific scars from a concentration camp.) As a cinephile and former film critic, Mendonça Filho is delightfully adept at filling a frame with eye-catching movie posters and a number of secret meetings take place in a 35mm projectionist’s booth, where the grandfather works. This background is enlivened by D.P. Evgenia Alexandrova’s images, all the more atmospheric for being shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses for period authenticity.
An opening title informs us, with a touch of black humor, that 1977 was “a period of great mischief.” Before Marcelo is even close to the city, he gets a foretaste of the lethal atmosphere in a lonely gas station where he stops to fill up his battered VW Beetle. A few yards away lies a dead man under a piece of cardboard. The attendant calmly complains he has a hard job keeping stray dogs off the corpse, and though he phoned the police several days ago, they haven’t gotten around to coming by yet to take a look. They have their hands full with carnival week, which entices violence, and more than 100 deaths are expected before it’s over. Just then a patrol car pulls in. Ignoring the dead body, the two cops shake down Marcelo for spare change and his cigarettes.
Meanwhile in Recife, a trio of shady characters covered in carnival confetti march threateningly into a research lab. The scariest hombre turns out to be Police Chief Euclides and the others his trusted guns. The fetid body of a shark lies on an operating table with a hairy human leg sticking out of its side. The leading researcher (who is studying the shark) widens the incision and yanks it out. Later, Euclides’ men will steal the leg (which they obviously know all about) and throw it into the river, weighting it to make sure it stays down this time. But newspaper stories about the hairy leg turn it into an object of mass hysteria, and many people swear they have seen it in parks late at night, kicking the gay couples who use it as a cruising spot, a clever way for the film to foreground queerness under the dictatorship. (There are other jokes about the people having sex in public, like two employees in the registry office caught behind the filing cabinets.)
Welcomed with food, money and false identity papers and hidden away in a comfortable apartment by the 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria), Marcelo gradually discovers what he has in common with his neighbors: they are all wanted for political reasons. As a safe house, it is the opposite of secure, and he is easy to track down at work in the Identity Institute, where he has the run of the state’s ID documents and can search for some record of his mother. This is exactly what happens in the film’s final section, aptly called “Blood Transfusion”, after a powerful businessman he has crossed gets wind he is in town and hires a killer to take him out. The killer, in turn, subcontracts the job to a local hitman, who botches everything in an exciting foot chase strewn with dead bodies.
But it doesn’t end there. Marcelo’s fate is being investigated by a college student (Laura Lufesi) in the present day. She weirdly pops up from time to time, listening to audio tapes made of Marcelo and a mysterious woman called Elza. The present day returns in the long final sequence with its radical change-of-pace rhythm, and feels like something of a let-down. Filmed on colorless white sets, it brings the action to a screeching halt as it explains some of the connections between the various characters.
Music plays a powerful role in animating the sequences and the eclectic period choices by Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves are a joy.
Director, screenplay: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Producer: Emilie Lesclaux
Cast: Wagner Moura, Udo Kier, Maria Fernanda Candido, Gabriel Leone, Carlos Francisco, Alice Carvalho, Roberio Diogenes, Hermila Guedes, Igor De Araujo, Italo Martins, Laura Lufesi, Roney Villela, Isabél Zuaa
Cinematography: Evgenia Alexandrova
Editing: Eduardo Serrano, Matheus Farias
Production design: Thales Junqueira
Music: Tomaz Alves Souza, Mateus Alves
Sound: Moabe Filho, Pedrinho Moreira
Production companies: Cinemascópio, MK Prods., Lemming Film, One Two Films
World Sales: MK2
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Portuguese
158 minutes
