Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers one of the films of the year with this political thriller that hoovered up awards at Cannes. It stars Wagner Moura as Armando, an ex-academic who lands in Recife during Carnival time in 1977. Once there, he's welcomed into a kind of apartment block commune, filled with other 'refugees' from some tyranny or other. The opening of the film teases the situation, slowly unpicking the threads as we cruise through the northern Brazilian setting. It's extremely confident of keeping details held back, no need to rush the exposition.
We're introduced to quite a few characters, on both sides of humanity - helpful matriarchs, corrupt cops, selfless in-laws, scuzzy hitmen, crusading journos, and one Jewish German Holocaust survivor. Yep, there's a lot going on here. Around the end of the first act, we flash-forward to the present to find a couple of researchers going through old cassette tapes of interviews between Armando and Elza (Maria Fernando Cândido), an advocate trying to obtain exit papers for Armando and his son. From here on, the narrative jumps forward occasionally to one of the researchers, Flavia (Laura Lufési), as she tries to uncover what happened all those years ago.
The street scenes of 1970s Recife are amazing, particularly one shot of the river from a window in a cinema. It's not breathtaking scenery as such, but it's utterly evocative. A fair bit of the action takes place in an awesome old projection room at said cinema, apparently seen in Mendonça's previous documentary about Recife's cinema-going past, Pictures of Ghosts. The art department has excelled itself, cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova deserves praise, and the music is great too, with some groovy old Brazilian tracks mixed in with Donna Summer and Chicago.
In the third act, there's a very Coen-esque, elliptical moment that is so matter-of-fact, it knocks you back a bit. And there is one sequence that completely elevates The Secret Agent from very good to excellent. I won't go into it, just to say, in retrospect, it seems like a lot of the measured, even-paced legwork was building up to that confrontation. Fantastic stuff.
The performances are from the top drawer. Wagner Moura, with his downcast expression and gentle manner, excels in the role of Armando. Alice Carvahlo, as his wife Fátima, has one electric moment, and Gregorio Graziosi as businessman Ghirotti is appropriately slimy, as is Robério Diógenes as dodgy police chief, Euclides. There's also a spot of grand larceny from the old caretaker Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), she holds court and steals every scene she's in.
The film is popping with metaphors. Armando's son Fernando is itching to see the film Jaws, on release after the discovery of a severed leg inside a shark off the coast. We find out later than when he finally saw it, he stopped having nightmares. Some of the subtext, though, flew past yours truly. On occasion, the camera zooms into specific portraits hanging on walls of buildings (regime figures, maybe?). I'm lost on the significance of a red-masked carnival character that appears sometimes, there's a two-faced cat and a fucking weird sidebar of a newspaper story about the 'Hairy Leg'. I guess Brazilians of the time will have more background knowledge but these few head scratchers didn't subtract anything from the enjoyment of the film.
The Secret Agent is part of the Lotterywest Perth Festival film season at UWA Somerville. It's running from Jan 5th to 11th. Do yourself a favour and go see it.
See also:
This was the final film for Udo Kier (he died in Nov 2025), so it seems only right to suggest one of the many film he appeared in. I'll go for E. Elias Merhige's odd Shadow of the Vampire (2000), which I've likely recommended before. For a thematic link, let's choose the recent I'm Still Here (2024), directed by Walter Salles.
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