In the opening title scroll of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, the Brazil of 1977 the film takes place in is announced as “a time of great mischief.” The words are placed over a desolate landscape: a road cutting between fields, a decrepit gas station with a body lying in the parking lot, and a yellow VW Beetle pulling in. The man in the car almost panics upon seeing the rotting corpse covered in cardboard, but the sweating station owner runs out to stop him and tell him it’s okay — it happened a few days ago and they told the police, but they haven’t come yet because it is Carnival. A pair of highway patrolmen pull up to the gas station, disembarking to interrogate the man in the Beetle. The driver notices a spot of blood on the policeman’s shirt as he’s being asked to show everything in his car is up to regulation. The policeman clears him, and asks for a donation to their fund. The man has no more money and instead offers the rest of his cigarettes before going on his way.
The man in the car is Marcelo (played elusively by Wagner Moura), who’s on his way to Recife for reasons unknown as of yet. When he gets there, he hides out at Doña Sebastiana’s (Tânia Maria), in a massive compound filled with equally ambiguous refugees from at home and abroad, including a couple who say they had a falling out with all sides in Angola, implying a political bent. The Secret Agent, beyond the genre implications of its name, is brilliantly slow to play its hand. Before the film makes explicit what its specific political aims are, Filho’s project spends most of its runtime living within the milieu of an unspoken political repression, one of constant police encroachment on civil life and looked over by portraits of President Ernesto Geisel, himself a retired general who would start to usher in openness to Brazilian society during the military dictatorship that started back in 1964 and would endure until the mid-’80s.
The Secret Agent is Filho’s first period-set fiction film, richly texturing itself in the decor, fabrics, and especially dagger collars. This emphasis on detail itself is prodded in the film, with the director’s framing being open to how this is a work of reconstruction, a sometimes futile effort in suffusing memory of a time with archival material in order to create a kind of living, breathing filmic archeology. Or, at least, that attempt has its limits, as people die, are killed, or forget what happened outside the margins of a newspaper. Filho takes us digging, anyways, through the form of a thriller, as if the popular cinema of the time overtakes the feeling of day-to-day reality. For instance, the Cinema São Luiz (featured previously in Filho’s 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, looking at his native Recife through his memories of its movie theaters) in The Secret Agent is playing Jaws, a poster of which frightens Marcelo’s son to the point of obsession, constantly thinking about and drawing shark attacks. Meanwhile, the local (and corrupt) chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes) is pulled out of Carnival — still covered in makeup and confetti — to examine a severed human leg that has been found inside a shark. The Secret Agent is at once a film about genre, while also playfully, and at times shockingly, letting itself slip into it.
Sometimes these genre elements read as euphemistic. There is one departure from realism in particular that won’t be spoiled here, but suffice it to say that it’s not a coincidence that a pulpy sequence of public violence that is laughed at in the newspaper is preceded by a scene where Euclides and his corrupt cops make an inference that they are going for a “ride” that night. We rarely get to see what the police actually do, only getting references to their bacchanalian cruelty, like when they see a headline saying how Carnival has claimed 91 lives, which they grinningly emphasize to each is only so far. But the genre elements in The Secret Agent slowly build and build, like the at-first subtle split diopter shots that get more severe and stark as the film progresses, until things ultimately explode into the kind of violent thriller the name promises.
Filho, in his constant withholding, though, makes the point. The film is about an exceptional case, a person whose story is endemic of an entire era, but the feeling persists for all the rest around Marcelo, involved with him or not. From the refugees to humble government registrars, everyone lives under the same oppressive, unspeakable umbrella. Filho emphasizes how different the world is now, how much life has ostensibly changed on the surface, how truly unknowable that moment might be given how much has been forgotten about it. Yet there is still some line running beneath it all — the movie house of his childhood might not be there anymore, but the roads still are, and from a world they didn’t even know was ruined they keep building a new life.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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