(4 stars)
One of the ways Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho sustains a sense of dread throughout “The Secret Agent” is to set the sharks circling.
There’s a fictional one, “Jaws” — or “Tubarão” — which, in the 1977 of the film, has only just surfaced on-screen at Cinema São Luiz and is otherwise busy devouring the dreams of Recife’s young ones. Then there’s the real one, now dead but still in possession of a mysterious human leg jutting from its gut. (And laboriously removed by an unbothered medical examiner in the film’s goriest moment.)
But the other way he does it — and what makes the 158 minutes of “O Agente Secreto” (in the original Portuguese) pass by like a gripping dream — is to suffuse it with beguiling uncertainties: Whom can you trust? Where are you safe? What is everyone’s real name? What can be said and what can’t?
The longer you spend in Filho’s vivid capture of urban Brazil under the repressive rule of a military dictatorship — and its network of eyes and ears — the more you become accustomed to its unspoken rules, the more you hear in its fleeting silences.
A quiet order undergirds the air of chaos and acts of violence across Recife in this “time of great mischief” (as it is euphemized early on). The 90-plus bodies that turn up (or go missing) over the course of Carnival are less cause to mourn than reason to bet there may yet be 100 (or more). And when the local media attributes the murders of several gay men in a cruising park to a rampage by the reanimated severed leg, it becomes clear that, under repression, reality and fantasy conspire to obscure each other.
This beautifully shot, lovingly stylized and masterfully paced Cannes-pleaser (Filho won best director in May) centers on Armando, whom we also come to know as Marcelo, a former professor turned political refugee and recent widower, played with exacting control by Wagner Moura, who took best actor at said French festival and made history this month as the first Brazilian man ever to earn a Golden Globe nomination for lead actor in a drama. (“The Secret Agent” also secured nominations for best motion picture and best non-English motion picture.)
From its opening shakedown to its final takedown, “The Secret Agent” wanders a world consumed by corruption. Returning to Recife, Armando takes cover at a safe house (“the Ofir madhouse,” as one calls it) run by the tough and tender Dona Sebastiana (a beautiful performance by Tânia Maria) and bustling with other refugees — some of whom chafe at the term. Armando seeks to reunite with his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who can’t seem to stop drawing the sharks from his nightmares, or begging his grandfather Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), a projectionist at the São Luiz, to let him see “Tubarão.”
Through a network of pay phones, telegrams and aliased sympathizers — led by the steely Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) — Armando discovers he is the intended target of an approaching pair of hit men (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone). They’ve been dispatched by Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a former head of the country’s largest power company and no fan of Armando’s lithium battery research, his wife Fátima’s attitude (Alice Carvalho’s brief turn is extraordinary) or the comparably provincial northeast receiving state funds.
Barred from leaving the country, Armando must vanish into the city, shaving his beard to work as Marcelo at the city’s identification center, awaiting a fake passport, rifling through records to find documentary evidence of his dead mother and laying low as a swarm of sketchy characters begin to smell blood in the water — including the delightfully slimy Chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes).
Filho’s sharply drawn characters stand out from the Carnival crowd: There’s Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio), the wild-eyed hit man hired by the hit men. There’s Hans (Udo Kier, in his final role), the Holocaust survivor mistaken for a Nazi and mercilessly taunted by Euclides into showing his scars and bullet wounds; there’s Thereza Vitória (Isabél Zuaa) and Antonio (Licínio Januário), refugees of the Angolan civil war, now living under new names and Sebastiana’s shrewd security.
And there’s Flavia (a compelling Laura Lufési), the present-day history student combing through a cache of cassettes in an attempt to reconstruct the contours of the resistance network. In her belated surveillance, we can feel both the passage and the collapse of time.
Are we watching Flavia fill in the gaps between her headphones? Or is the film strictly the product of Filho’s panoramic imagination? (Its unfussy homage to the colors, textures and sounds of 1970s Brazilian cinema hints at the latter.) “The Secret Agent” suggests something more consequential with its gripping portrait of political resistance: that survival is a matter of both watching and watching over one another.
R. At Alamo Drafthouse Cinema DC Bryant Street, AMC Georgetown 14 and AFI Silver Theatre. Contains strong bloody violence, sexual content, language and some full nudity. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 158 minutes.
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