Kleber Mendonça Filho’s semi-satirical thriller The Secret Agent looks back with incredulity, disgust, and ambiguous nostalgia at the Wild West that Brazil became during the 1964-85 military dictatorship. Mendonça set the film during 1977, when he was eight, and he has filtered his own memories into its world of casual killings and endemic corruption.
Fatalistic in tone, despite its leisurely pace and a gonzo horror interlude, it follows the progress of a fugitive from injustice, Armando, a passive protagonist portrayed with disarming equanimity but an undertow of sorrow by Oscar nominee Wagner Moura.
A widowed former university professor, he is first seen arriving in a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle at a sunlit rural petrol station where the attendant skates over the fact that a rotting corpse is lying on the dirt forecourt; he has at least had the grace to cover it with cardboard, and he shoos away the wild dogs who come looking for a snack. Patrol car cops who turn up ignore the body but check Armando’s ID and, since he has no cash left, take his last few cigarettes.
He is on the run, driving the 1700 miles from São Paulo to his (and Mendonça’s) north-eastern home city Recife, to escape two hitmen contracted to kill him by Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a venal industrialist with government ties. Armando plans to collect his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), from his in-laws and figure out how to start a new life with him.
Flashbacks later show Ghirotti closing down Armando’s publicly funded science research department to feather his own nest, and Armando tussling with Ghirotti’s son in a restaurant for socially demeaning him and his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) and accusing them of communist sympathies. Fátima paid the price for bawling out the Ghirottis, though Arnando tells Fernando that she died of pneumonia.
In Recife, where revelling Carnival-goers carry on as usual, Armando moves into a safe house run by the grandmotherly anarcho-Communist Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) and befriends the women, gay people, and Angolan Civil War refugees living there. Representing hope for Brazil’s future, the community's warmth, diversity, and solidarity posit it an antidote to Recife’s nest of thugs, goblins, and crooked officials
These include the Rabelaisian police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes). He meets Armando after he has adopted the alias Marcelo and taken a job, arranged by the resistance network, that enables him to work hidden in plain sight at the city’s identity card office – and search for documentation about his long dead mother. Preserving family identity – a fraught exercise – is germane here.
The odious Euclides brings Armando to the shop of a German tailor and sadistically torments the old man, a Jewish Holocaust survivor (the late Udo Kier in his final part), believing him to be an escaped Nazi war criminal. Such incidents illustrate Brazil’s moral miasma under the general-presidents. When Euclides’ henchmen sons dump the body of an old woman in a bodybag over a sea wall, one fears for Dona Sebastian.
After Euclides is summoned by a marine lab to investigate why a dead tiger shark has been found with a human leg in its mouth in the Capaparibe River, the limb goes AWOL – the absent body it was once attached to symbolizing the 243 people known to have disappeared on top of the 191 murdered during the dictatorship. (Some 20,000 citizens were tortured; at least 8,350 indigenous people died as collateral damage; different estimates put the figure much higher.)
In a surreal set piece reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, the leg goes on the rampage, killing gay men in a hooking-up park. The urban legend of “the hairy leg” was codified by journalists as a metaphor for police violence and state terror against minoritized groups. Mendonça remembered it from his boyhood when the leg’s supposed severing not far from the Atlantic increased his desire to see Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, a need Fernando inherits.
Nothing to do with espionage, The Secret Agent is affectionately named for the alter ego of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s crime writer in Philippe de Broca’s Le Magnifique (1973), which Armando glimpses at the Cinema São Luiz, where his father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is the projectionist. He meets there the resistance leader Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) who urges him to flee abroad. (The cinema was featured by Mendonça in his 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, which reflected on the pop-cultural influence of Recife’s movie palaces and their fare on himself and fellow worshippers during the dark years.)
The bloody action that ensues is crosscut with contemporary scenes depicting a laptop-equipped modern-day history student, Flavia (Laura Lufési), and her friend researching Armando’s life in a newspaper library, her reconstruction of the Recife episode mirroring and to some extent demythicizing the film’s narrative. Her meeting with a doctor in his fifties poignantly reveals that she, a stranger, has become Armando’s last witness and the guardian of his memory.
In making the film, Mendonça drew on spaghetti Westerns – as he did on his and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau (2019) – giallos, neo-noirs, conspiracy thrillers, and the likes of his countryman Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later (1984) and Elio Petrio’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970).
The Secret Agent is as much about the role that movies play in framing private and collective memories as it is about the journey of a good man subjected to the horrors unleashed by draconian authoritarianism. It's a monumental film, a repository and a mausoleum, vibrant and optimistic for all that.
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