On a dusty road in a stretch of Brazilian nowhere circa 1977, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls into a gas station where a dead body lies under a piece of cardboard held down by a rock.
The attendant explains that it’s been there since Sunday, the result of a theft gone awry, and that the cops refuse to deal with it. No sooner has he said that than the Highway Patrol arrives, although they’re less interested in the corpse than in the canary Bug’s driver, Marcelo (Wagner Moura), They search his car and find nothing, but the tension of the encounter, exacerbated by the presence of the recently deceased, suggests that catastrophe is only a hair’s breadth away.
Marcelo, it’s subsequently revealed, has returned to his hometown of Recife to reunite with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes)—a mission that, in The Secret Agent, which just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, is complicated by the fact that he’s on the run from shadowy forces.
Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s electrically eclectic film, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director and Best Actor prizes, is a political thriller about the ghastly final years of the Brazilian dictatorship, which took from its citizens their families, loves, histories, dreams, and identities. Not content to be simply one thing, however, this multifaceted genre effort colors its suspense with elements of comedy, mystery, and horror, creating a cinematic stew that dovetails naturally with its affection for the movies, whose presence is constant and epitomized by Fernando’s fixation on Jaws.
Mimicking the form, and channeling the spirit, of ’70s big-screen blockbusters, it’s a bravura tale of community, persecution, and the way in which memory is both stolen and recovered.
A puzzle that doesn’t divulge how its pieces fit together for much of its pulse-pounding 158 minutes, The Secret Agent follows Marcelo from the desert to a residential complex owned by Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who’s covertly housing “refugees” (a word too dangerous to utter aloud) who want to avoid the authorities and flee to safer shores.
Marcelo gets a job at the state identification archives in order to hide from his pursuers and, also, to locate the ID card of his long-gone mother. By happenstance, this gig introduces him to Police Chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), an official with a perpetual s–t-eating grin on his face and two loyal underlings by his side.
Euclides radiates corruption and cruelty, remarking that, by its conclusion, this year’s carnival death toll will exceed its present 91 fatalities. The men and women Marcelo meets courtesy of Sebastiana, on the other hand, are a trustworthy bunch, including single mom and dentist Claudia (Hermila Guedes), who gives him a humorously sexy dental exam in the bedroom of Sebastiana’s daughter, who was murdered by her fiancé.
Through flashbacks, we slowly learn that Marcelo was a teacher and the head of a university research department, and that he ran afoul of a big-business baddie who wanted to shut down the public school’s operation.
The past and the present intermingle at will in The Secret Agent, whose narrative additionally features snippets of two present-day researchers listening to covertly made tape recordings of Marcelo and others, such as Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who sought to procure for the harried widower a fake passport that would facilitate his escape from Brazil. Everything and everyone are fragmented in Mendonça’s film, whose action is divided into three chapters, spans disparate decades (and waking and slumbering realities), and is awash in characters using aliases.
Throughout, The Secret Agent pulls off an audacious tightrope act, balancing various tones and modes to expert effect.
The discovery of a dead shark with a human leg in its belly is paralleled with Spielberg’s aquatic classic, and leads to a fantastical fictional newspaper story about said appendage slaughtering a park’s late-night gay cruisers, which the director dramatizes in throwback grindhouse fashion.
Marcelo’s father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is a projectionist at the movie theater Mendonça highlighted in his 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts (and which is now traumatizing audiences with The Omen), and he aids Marcelo in his quest to stay close to Fernando at the same time that he grieves the loss of his daughter, whose fate is hinted at by a former hostile incident.
Moreover, two hitmen, Augusto (Roney Villela) and his stepson Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), are on their way to Recife to take care of Marcelo, and their chumminess with Chief Euclides underlines the foundational rot of this autocracy.
Fathers and (surrogate) sons are everywhere in The Secret Agent, as are instances of oppressive vice, coercion, and cruelty. As with a scene that finds Euclides amusing himself by forcing Udo Kier’s Jewish tailor to display his WWII scars, Mendonça details the myriad means by which authoritarianism shatters its subjects, ripping them to (literal and figurative) shreds, and he evokes the madness of this era with a skillfulness that also characterizes his film’s old-school style.
From split screens and transitional fades and wipes, to split diopter shots and grainy widescreen imagery that has a warm, sunburnt tactility, the material is visually rapturous, and Mateus Alves and Tomaz Alves Souza’s diverse and charged score is a unique blend of the old and new.
During its closing chapters, The Secret Agent becomes a borderline hallucinatory vortex of recurring images, sounds, incidents, and motifs (like the color yellow), all of them in edgy dialogue with each other. As Marcelo’s predicament deteriorates thanks to the designs of multiple villains, the film picks up further steam.
Similarly, Moura’s performance, already such a poignant portrait of determination in the face of tyrannical torment, turns even more moving. With a placidness that can’t conceal his desperation, the actor has never been better. Regardless of the helter-skelter madness swirling around his character, he grounds the proceedings in urgent emotion, all the way to a finale that, in Mendonça’s typically atypical fashion, refrains from showing its tragic climax.
The filmmaker’s refusal to present a traditional thriller payoff may frustrate some viewers, but ultimately, it’s in keeping with The Secret Agent’s depiction of the way in which dictatorships torment and destroy via denial. Nonetheless, for all its despair, Mendonça’s latest clings to hope, recognizing in its touching coda that healing is possible, and reconstitution (of body, mind, and spirit) is possible, so long as there are people dedicated to remembering.
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