The Secret Agent Takes You By Surprise
Wagner Moura is magnificent as a political refugee fleeing an authoritarian regime in one of the best movies of the year.
A title card opens Kleber Mendonça Filho’s electrifying new film The Secret Agent, cheekily setting the scene: It’s 1977 Brazil, “a time of mischief.”
It’s an odd way to describe a movie that takes place at the height of the country’s military dictatorship, but it’s in keeping with Filho’s shaggy, warm-blooded political thriller, a movie that splits the difference between neo-noir, languorous character drama, and, occasionally, magical realist comedy. Anchored by a magnificent Wagner Moura, who delivers one of the knottiest, most complex lead performances of the year, The Secret Agent sneaks up on you — not by virtue of any shocking twists, but simply by how it refuses to be just one thing.
After that curious title card, The Secret Agent begins with Marcelo (Moura) driving into a lonely gas station on the outskirts of Recife. A station attendant hurriedly attends to him, apologetically telling him to ignore the corpse currently roasting in the sun a few feet away from them. It’s half-covered by dirty pieces of cardboard, a sad attempt at giving this anonymous cadaver some dignity. The man was shot trying to rob the place, the gas station attendant says, pitifully. He had already called the police a few days ago, but no one had come. But shortly, two policemen do pull up, but not to collect the body; they ask to see Marcelo’s documents and car, which is filled to the brim with his belongings, looking for something, anything, illicit. Finding nothing, they let Marcelo on his way, but not before one holds out his hand for a bribe.
It’s a grimy scene that feels more at home with the exploitation flick send-up that was Mendonça’s last film, 2019’s Bacurau. But it’s just a piece of this shapeshifter of a movie, which happily leaps between genres and tones, transforming The Secret Agent into something akin to a fable.
The Secret Agent is straightforward up to a point: Marcelo is a former university professor whose real name is Armando, forced to go on the run after he made an enemy of Ghirotti, a crooked federal official from Sao Paolo. Fleeing to Recife to reunite with his son, Armando is taken under the wing of the elderly Dona Sebastiana (an ebullient Tânia Maria), the unofficial protector of political refugees like him. Armando is set up with an apartment, an envelope full of cash, and a contact who can help manufacture fake IDs for him and his son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes). Soon, Armando starts building a life for himself, getting a job at the city's social registration archive and striking up friendships with his fellow refugees (and even a romance with one).
The Secret Agent, which ambles along languidly for much of its two-hour 45-minute runtime, makes that time worth it with the many rich and warm characters that populate the film. There’s Armand’s father-in-law (Carlos Francisco), who works at the local movie palace and imparts his love of films to his grandson. There’s genre legend Udo Kier, in his final film role, as Hans, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and tailor frequently harassed by Armando’s superiors. And there’s the fellow refugees, all so fleshed out and richly realized that they feel like they’ve walked straight out of a Pedro Almodovar melodrama.
Populated by so many richly-realized characters, The Secret Agent makes you want to live within it for as long as possible.
But just as the film seems to settle into a nice, comforting rhythm, The Secret Agent raises the stakes — and drastically switches up the tone — with the introduction of two hitmen hired by Ghirotti to assassinate Armando. It’s at this point that The Secret Agent morphs and transmutes in thrilling ways. There was always an undercurrent of violent dread coursing through the film, with two university researchers’ discovery of a human leg found inside a captured tiger shark. But this subplot seemed to give way to a blackly comic subplot, when the two buffoonish sons of a corrupt police chief are sent to dispose of the leg, and do it badly. But when the hitmen arrive in town — and make the acquaintance of these same corrupt police officers — The Secret Agent’s rich tapestry of characters start to collide in sometimes funny, often tragic ways.
But even as the film hurtles towards its dark climax, Mendonça finds ways to insert a little bit of brevity, or even surrealism; one interlude has the human leg gain sentience and start a string of violent attacks against gay men cruising in a public park at night, which newspapers breathlessly report on, in a bit of political cover-up-turned-mythmaking. That’s the kind of movie that Mendonça is making: one where bloodshed and the bizarre sit side-by-side. Even as the film suddenly adopts a new perspective, that of a modern-day student unearthing the tapes of Armando discussing his case with a resistance facilitator known as Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), The Secret Agent never loses that sense of magical realism; fitting, perhaps, considering the Latin American roots of the genre.
With the film’s gorgeous, lightly saturated palette — leant a natural warmth by the Panavision anamorphic lenses that Mendonça and cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova shot with — The Secret Agent feels like it was transported straight from the ‘70s. Every frame crackles with warmth and energy, much as every one of its characters pop off the screen. And while it has all the twists and turns of the much more serious genres of noir or political thrillers, The Secret Agent defies those genre trappings to deliver something deeply, beautifully humanist.
