Written and Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 161 min | ▲▲▲▲
The Secret Agent is a deconstructed political thriller from Brazil, but almost as if the filmmaker was inspired by Robert Altman, certainly the broad palate of American films of the 1970s. His rambling, rangy story is set in 1977, and for much of its length is a drama and a character study more than a thriller. It follows an academic and engineer, Armando aka Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who returns to his hometown of Recife in the north part of the country and gets involved with a resistance group to the military dictatorship.
This isn’t always an easy film to follow, but it’s never dull or incoherent as it paints a fascinating picture of a time and a place, a vivid culture full of colour, flavour, and music blasting out of radios. Armando lives in an apartment block full of refugees, some of whom have come to Brazil from Angola. Though we don’t spend a lot of time with these people, they’re well cast and all make an impression.
What holds it all together is the towering lead performance by Wagner Moura as Armando. He oozes an indefinable soulfulness, even as his motivations are occasionally opaque. He’s placed at an office that issues identification cards, and spends his time looking for official papers about his mother. He spends time with his father-in-law who has been raising his son — his wife died some years before. His father-in-law works as a projectionist at the local cinema, which is showing Jaws.
The spectre of the shark is strong in the film, both as this recurrent cinematic monster, but also because a man’s severed leg was cut out of a tiger shark’s belly. The mystery of where the leg came from isn’t one for long — a corrupt police captain and his deputized sons are in the habit of dropping bodies off a bridge nearby. But the local press make a meal of this leg, eventually we get this wild, surreal scene of the leg attacking queer men at the spot near the beach where they have sex.
The film also flashes forward, to students studying tapes related to what these people in the resistance were doing at the time. This is jarring, but no less than a scene of a blue, bloodied leg hopping around kicking people.
All this while assassins, paid by a political and personal enemy of Armando’s, come into town to kill him. The echoes of a movie like No Country For Old Men can be heard somewhere in the distance, but this sprawling picture is its own beast, fascinating and mysterious. Can anyone who’s seen it explain the significance of the janus cat?
This is the second Brazilian film in two years — after I’m Still Here — to explore this dark period in the nation’s political history, and it’s just as strong.
