The Secret Agent is a densely packed, wickedly crafted testament to history and the vitality of knowledge and community in the face of violence and censorship. Alive with metaphors and a powerful leading performance, it may well join the ranks of Pixote and City of God as a fundamental Brazilian classic.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent opens unassumingly. A man in a beat-up yellow Beetle stops at a petrol station outside of Recife, Brazil. The road is desolate, and the station is empty save for the attendant. But lying nearby, barely covered by a piece of cardboard, is a human corpse – a deafeningly silent sign of the political authoritarianism of the time. It’s bizarre and chilling, but it sets the picture’s narrative and thematic tone superbly. What appears to be an idiosyncratic thriller is, in fact, an engrossing exploration of memory and resilience.
It’s 1977, during the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The man in the Beetle is Armando (Wagner Moura), a widower and former university professor who is attempting to flee persecution after clashing with a corrupt executive director (Luciano Chirolli). Using the codename Marcelo, Armando takes shelter at a refuge for political dissidents, using his contacts to seek a way out of Brazil while searching for information on his late mother, whom he barely remembers. Meanwhile, felonious Recife police officers investigate the discovery of a human leg inside a tiger shark, and hitmen hired by the executive director actively search for Armando.
The opening titles describe 1977 Brazil as a “time of great mischief”, a branding that quickly establishes the film’s charismatic pastiche. Many of the best political satires from The Great Dictator to Dr Strangelove to The Firemen’s Ball paint their authoritarian targets as intimidating and incompetent alike. The Secret Agent stops shy of becoming a full-blown comedy, like those titles, but it does highlight the underlying ridiculousness of controlling regimes. The police officers of Recife, namely the chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), don’t even hide their opportunism or delinquency. The hitmen hired to eliminate Armando are a bizarre stepfather-stepson duo who look more like holidaymakers for the ongoing Carnival celebrations than elite assassins.
Stories of the dictatorship’s actions against dissidents are met with disbelief, with one sequence involving a Frankensteinian stop-motion sequence and a human limb. Kleber and team walk a tightrope of surrealism throughout the picture, one that’s impossible not to find some chuckles in, albeit it is the definition of gallows humour – a marked contrast to the vivid colour palette of bright yellows, reds and whites.
The tumultuousness of this period in Brazilian history is never downplayed. Just as the film’s hybridised blend of dark laughs and neo-noir suspense creeps up on us, the filmmaking slowly but surely gets under our skin. Evgenia Alexandrova’s cinematography lingers like a watchful eye over each setpiece, as tense and anxious as the protagonist. Through the portrayal of civilians sharing stories, be it bogus newspaper headings or tales of how they came to the refuge, an atmosphere of urgency and uncertainty hangs above, the power of dictatorship affecting everyone on screen in big and small ways by suppressing their right to free expression or by elevating their worst qualities. As morbid as the plotline involving the human leg inside the shark is, its inclusion is paramount to this nail-biting atmosphere.
Metaphors are utilised in riveting fashion throughout, with the human leg physically embodying the film’s core themes. Despite the great lengths Euclindes goes to hide the evidence of its existence, word still quickly gets out. While the identity of the leg is never revealed, it’s implied to be the fate awaiting Armando if he doesn’t escape; its presence throughout the story serves as a reminder of what happens when authoritarian overreach seeps into public life. It’s frightening and evokes a sense of powerlessness, but Kleber and team nonetheless showcase the necessity of standing up to the perceived might of totalitarianism.
Another recurring motif is the use of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, which screens throughout Recife. The poster alone is enough to induce nightmares in Armandi’s young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes). Yet a poster is not a film, and it’s only when we confront fear, be it a film or political tyranny, that we can find the cracks in its influence.
A colourful cabal of characters keeps these conflicts mesmerising. Despite the title’s implication of a gun-slinging espionage hero, Armando is defined by his everyman status. He’s merely a professor and a father who wants to express his liberal politics freely and take pride in his research. The suppression of knowledge and free speech that the military dictatorship enforces is what has put him in the firing line. Wagner Moura, a veteran actor from his native Brazil, embodies the various planes Armando must navigate with charm and gravitas alike. Just as Moura can be cool and collected in the face of hostility, so too can he be vulnerable and terrified behind closed doors. In a sea of exuberant performances – another standout is Tania Maria as the refuge’s anarcho-communist host Dona Sebastiana – Moura dazzles with a singular effervescence, an absorbing feat more than deserving of his Best Actor Oscar nomination.
The film is a disquieting, but curious peering into the past, a feeling that becomes more prevalent with the reveal of a midpoint narrative shift involving student Flavia (Laura Lufési). If the film’s intention is to look back in time, then it does so with as much urgency as its characters, a choice that enhances its idiosyncratic tone. As harrowing and grotesque as living under dictatorship and political violence is, it is nonetheless vital that such stories are preserved if only so that we can understand the past and take steps not to repeat them today.
Through this lens, the film becomes a tribute to resilience and resistance, however big or small our actions may be, championing the power of cognition, freedom and solidarity – lessons that many in our polarised world are more in need of hearing than ever before. It uses history to critique our present, telling a hypnotically alluring story in the process.
The long runtime and the deliberate restraining of action until the final act may put some off. Yet these are small chips in an otherwise tightly woven tapestry of vivid craftsmanship and abundant thematic richness. The Secret Agent is a densely packed, wickedly crafted testament to history and the vitality of knowledge and community in the face of violence and censorship. Alive with metaphors and a powerful leading performance, it may well join the ranks of Pixote and City of God as a fundamental Brazilian classic. Politics and settlements may change with time, but the universality and wisdom of this picture will remain steadfast in the years to come.
The Secret Agent is playing in cinemas nationwide from February 20.
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