Review: "The Secret Agent" is a mischievous masterpiece

by Cláudio Alves

Today, The Secret Agent begins its Oscar-qualifying run, ahead of an awards season it enters full of high hopes. And why not? At Cannes, Kleber Mendonça Filho won the Best Director trophy while Wagner Moura was picked as Best Actor by the Main Competition jury, a set of honors complemented by the FIPRESCI prize, which made it the Croisette's most awarded film. Between critical acclaim and yet more festival hardware, The Secret Agent was announced as Brazil's official submission for the 98th Academy Awards, where it surely hopes to replicate some of I'm Still Here's success from last year. Right now, it's up for two Gotham awards, competing in the categories of Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance. 

All that said, at this time of the year, it's easy to let oneself think about cinema exclusively in these terms. The race for gold is a thrilling diversion, yet it shouldn't distract us from appreciating the art for what it is. Nor should it flatten how we look at film. In The Secret Agent's case, this is especially true as it's a work much greater than any award could hope to be. Pardon the hyperbole, but I'd easily call it a masterpiece, an instant classic even…

Few films put their cards on the table so promptly and persuasively as The Secret Agent does. You can regard its opening sequence as a crystallization of theme and formal strategy, a summary of style and intent, a rather perfect synecdoche of the whole project. It starts with the historical archive unleashed, a radio recording from the 1970s looking back to the decades before, as two men talk about the "Samba do Arpège" they danced to in their youth. It's an introduction to that same music, but it's also a reminiscence infused with nostalgia, already an inkling of loss pervading the film before a single character has been introduced, a narrative thread, a plot.

That tune, by Waldir Calmon and Luiz Bandeira, brings back memories of a legendary nightclub closed by the time of this radio talk, a chapter in the history of Brazilian music that was starting to be forgotten by the mid-70s, overwritten in the official record, erased. What follows is a flurry of photographs, black-and-white and exemplary of the specific cultural moment in Brazil, under fascist authority yet striving to break free. The still montage is relatively short, giving way to a wide-open landscape in warm overexposed hues, digital tinged with a hint of post-production patina to suggest a time gone by. In the distance, a bright yellow car approaches, and an on-screen text presents the scene, as if introducing a fairytale.

Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief…

As the car drives off the road, to a petrol station by the side, the camera follows suit as does the sound mix. Music shifts from non-diegetic clarity to a part of the sonic landscape, muffled by the noisy silence of this middle-of-nowhere and the buzz of swarming flies. There's a corpse lying on the dirt, greeting the camera feet first like a black-hearted lark borrowed from Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry. According to the station worker, it's been there since Sunday, a thief shot dead by his night shift colleague who then fled in fear of repercussion. Bless this mess, the stench of rotten flesh practically wafting off the screen, street dogs barking up a hungry storm as they beg for a nibble of the unfortunate soul whose only dignity is a bit of cardboard covering his face.

But there's no reason to worry. It's Carnaval, so the police's delay is to be expected. And what good do the authorities do anyway? Not much, as is soon proven when another car carrying two federal agents shows up, unwanted and at the most inopportune moment. If not for the beleaguered station worker, then for his client, a handsome fellow going by the name of Marcelo, travelling to Recife. His nervousness is obvious for anyone paying attention, flinty eyes shifting about, constantly calculating risks as one of the officers, the guy with a blood stain on his shirt, takes a special interest in him. One could presume suspicion, though it becomes fairly obvious, fairly quickly, that this song and dance is a matter of routine.

From Hitchcock to a John Sturges desert noir cum western, guided by Altmanian shaggy dog rhythms, to a bit of dark humor à la Buñuel's European tour of the 60s and 70s, The Secret Agent runs the gamut in less than ten minutes and ends on a not-so-subtle request by a policeman harkening for a bit of bribery. It's funny business, made funnier by the gag of a car full of masquerading kids and loud music approaching, seeing the body, and driving away unceremoniously. Even so, the threat of violence pulses barely beneath the surface, and it feels like something of a miracle that Marcelo gets out of it with only a couple of cigarettes lost in the exchange. A hint of masculine posturing goes a long way with the militaristic types who make intimidation their bread and butter.

Leaving the station behind, the opening credits start fading in, along with wips, zooms, phantom carriage shots, dissolves and music changes that include a military march on the radio, a flurry of crossfades hinting at the interiority of a man on the run from death. Nothing is too overstated, nothing is too explained, with various idiosyncrasies down the road adding potential confusion or wonderment, depending on the viewer. Trucks ahead bear religious sayings on their tail, while some dancers in folkloric costume and she-wolf masks beckon pagan revelry. They overlap the soundtrack's "If You Leave Me Now" with a Brazilian beat, as if we weren't already experiencing what could be described as a stimulus overdrive, perchance an overdose of cinema.

Fifteen minutes into a film flirting with a three-hour runtime, Kleber Mendonça Filho is both warning the viewer about the kind of picture he's envisioned and offering a guidebook to ease their trip through it. Most obviously, The Secret Agent announces itself as a portrait of Brazil couched in both period and regional specificity, insinuating deep reads and deep cuts without indulging the need of outsider audiences for added context. It's a bold move, which I respect and think ultimately works in the project's favor, though it risks alienation. The specific will always be above the blandly universal in my book, and one need not get every reference to go with the flow of a flick that excels so strongly at the level of mood, atmosphere, emotion.

There's more, still, including a palpable love for the endless possibilities of cinematic form that would make De Palma blush – pardon the reference to so many non-Brazilian filmmakers, but it's easier to get these points across by appealing to internationally well-known names rather than the likes of Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Jorge Bodanzky, Orlando Senna, etc. All that technique could be construed as showing off for no good reason, but Mendonça's design is nothing if not considered. Moreover, it imbues The Secret Agent with a sense of playfulness and joy which, for a story that ultimately reveals itself a tragedy, is essential as an antidote to gloom and doom and tonal monotony.

In showing love to cinema, the director is also paying homage and respect to its history. Which is another central tenet of The Secret Agent, a film that could be most expeditiously described as a rumination on memory. This refers to history as preserved in official sources and as remembered (or not) by those who lived it. This refers to individual remembrance and collective experience, the personal and the political paradoxical in how they intersect and parallel each other, two as one. There's the present dramatization of the past, our way of imagining it, coexisting with the archival record, be it photography or radio transmissions, the art that lives on as an expression from those who once lived. 

A social critique manifests alongside all these aspects, directed at a period of military dictatorship that isn't as old and overcome as some would like to think, for their own comfort and peace of mind. Or as an ideal to look back fondly on, as some others propose. The Secret Agent exposes the absurdities of life under authoritarian oppression, vivisecting the systemic rot that stinks fetid, as much as that decomposing fellow by the road. That it does so with humor and lightness, thrills and suspense and a lazy hedonism only makes it greater as a piece of art. After all, prescriptiveness only gets you so far, and a film ought to work first as cinema rather than some instrument for mass education. 

Anyway, what follows the rich text of this opening is a relatively simple story that may appear more mysterious at first because Mendonça's script discloses so little early on. It's all pretty well explained by a monologue and flashback sequence situated at the midpoint of The Secret Agent, giving shape to the seemingly shapeless. For clarity's sake, please allow me some spoiler-y description, as I outline the tale of Marcelo, whose actual name is Armando. When we find him on the road to Recife, he has recently lost his wife – dead from unknown cause - and his job – victim to the corruptive alliance between politics and capital, the public sector and private power, an exploited northeast preyed upon by an exploitative south. 

Back to his hometown under a secret alias, Marcelo takes residence in Dona Sebastiana's little abode for political refugees and social outcasts, while the resistance tries to forge him papers so he can escape Brazil with his son, Fernando. The boy is in the care of his maternal grandparents, and Marcelo spends his days working at a municipal archive, looking for a document of his mother, anything he might keep as he leaves the country for good. A ticking clock ticks ominously in the minds of all, as the Italian-surnamed industrialist who ruined Marcelo's life is out for revenge, having hired two contract killers from São Paulo to finish what he started. It's a cat-and-mouse affair and a waiting game to boot.

In the background, life goes on in the Northeastern metropolis, including the discovery of a man's leg inside a shark's stomach. The remains evidently belong to a victim of the state's political violence, mayhap another corporate murder or a plaything of the police that was thrown into the Atlantic but found its way back to shore. For the masses, it's a fun bit of grotesquerie to spice up the Carnaval season, bringing Jaws back to cinemas and adding fire to the fuel of the "Perna Cabeluda" (hairy leg) story, a local urban legend that allowed journalists to circumvent censorship by contextualizing repressed news stories as part of an ongoing tall tale. For Mendonça, it's an opportunity to reaffirm his love for genre cinema. 

You better believe that, at one point, The Secret Agent features a macabre short in which Perna Cabeluda hops, stop-motion style, into the cruising spots of the 13 de Maio Park and attacks the many enjoyers of anonymous public sex. It's debauched and horrific and funny as fuck, a wink to the carnal spectacle of the pornochanchada films of Brazil's past and many a genre import. For those who know the director's work intimately, it feels like a return to the nightmarish qualities of such shorts as Green Vinyl and The Little Cotton Girl. Similarly, Marcelo's father-in-law, Seu Alexandre, marks the fictionalized return of the real-life Cinema São Luiz projectionist we saw in Pictures of Ghosts and Mendonça's earlier non-fiction shorts.

That connection isn't a deliberate link, some studious attempt at call-back self-reference, but rather an emotional truth like many in a film whose very structure blossoms from the artist's affective bonds. Consider that, at the end of The Secret Agent's first movement – it's divided into three chapters – a framing device is introduced, and the action jumps from past to present day. What we perceive as Marcelo/Armando's story is something of a reconstruction conceptualized from incomplete sources, as a pair of young women digitize and catalogue a series of audio recordings made from interviews with members of the anti-fascist resistance.

There are gaps, pieces of the narrative missing from the record and from the film – How did Fernando's mother die? What did Dona Sebastiana do as an anarchist turned communist during WWII in Italy? Whose leg was that, exactly? These archives are a nation's memory, a collective retelling whose imperfections are baked in and reflect how historians study and investigate such cases. The structure, its unhurried unravelling, mimics that subjectivity while underlining the need for the preservation of the past, the fight against forgetting. And the film echoes what Mendonça would have known from being raised by his mother, Joselice Jucá, whose work as an historian has influenced her son's cinema for quite a while, though perhaps never as profoundly as here.

Partially because of that, The Secret Agent comes off like a culmination of Kleber Mendonça Filho's life as cinephile and cineaste, an apotheosis and a state of grace. It does not, however, succumb to auteuristic solipsism. If anything, the director seems more motivated by a deep love for the characters, going so far as to avoid a bloody climax to prevent the camera and the audience from reveling, however unintentionally, in his hero's sad fate. If it's a destabilizing indulgence, storytelling-wise, it comes from a place of generosity and beckons the viewer to think more deeply about not just what's on-screen but what is absent. 

This attitude is perhaps best understood in the ensemble dynamics. Wagner Moura is delivering a movie star tour de force, playing two characters who move through the world distinctly, while never bringing attention to the inherent virtuosity, skill or effort of his acting. For a performance that's earned such attention, it's remarkably low-key, taking every chance to downplay what other thespians would turn into a circus – the 25-minute monologue, originally shot in one uninterrupted take, comes to mind. Nevertheless, no matter how central he might be, Moura remains an ensemble player, and Marcelo's return to Recife is like Dorothy's trip to Oz or Alice's descent into Wonderland.

In other words, Mendonça and company insist on a picaresque storytelling model that lets the text's attention and the camera's eye drift away from the lead, toward an array of colorful personalities and even more colorful performances. Tânia Maria is a force of nature as Dona Sebastiana, her fantasist evasions about an absent niece as touching as anything in Moura's repertoire. Gabriel Leone commands the screen while saying very little, playing the world's hunkiest little fascist, letting himself be a delicacy the frame delights in consuming. Fátima Nascimento has one scene to make a dead woman come back to life, and she succeeds in unforgettable fashion. 

Carlos Francisco will break your heart as Seu Alexandre, and Maria Fernanda Cândido will suggest the tensest of thrillers with her eyes, shining with purpose and paranoia. Isabél Zuaa enchants with a soft voice and Angolan accent, growing steely with the memory of Portuguese colonial violence, and Rogério Diógenes embodies the smallness of authoritarianism with a greasy, confetti-peppered countenance. I could go on, for The Secret Agent has a giant cast, but I'll refrain from such excess and mention only one name more – Udo Kier. The German superstar who the world recently lost appears in two scenes, but speaks in only one, which, for Kleber Mendonça Filho, might evidence the film's themes even better than the opening.

Under this director's gaze, fascism is seen as a death cult where violence and valor are intrinsically connected. It's also a deeply sexist system, where men are exalted as superior by their adherence to traditional values, all derived from the might and ability to destroy. To be a man, a real man, is to kill. So, a Belgian Jew will let the police believe he is a former Nazi soldier, earning their respect while opening other avenues of exploitation. He's respected for a perceived monstrosity, but he's also paraded like a zoo animal, a freakshow attraction with a body ravaged by bullets and who knows what else. In one fell swoop, Kier sets the screen aflame with righteous anger. 

And in that fury, a slew of questions burn bright, illuminating other central ideas of The Secret Agent. Who are we? Where do we come from? Who will we let ourselves become, and what will we leave behind? Identity is defined by history, the truth and the twisted lie that's imposed, whether fed to us with honey or forced down our throats. A city symphony for Recife, a meditation on Brazil, Mendonça's film is a polysemic, polyvalent wonder whose complexities I could spend a lifetime describing. It's so full of life, so curious about everything it regards, seemingly always looking in two directions, just like the Janus-headed cat Dona Sebastiana keeps around. 

So, let's do like that formidable woman who might be better suited for the title of secret agent than Moura's characters. Let's toast to the refugees, to a better Brazil and a better world, to a place our children will hopefully get to grow up in. And maybe, let's also do like Fernando, all grown up, and grieve for those we lost, for the forgotten, for the movie palaces of yore and all the souls who once walked through their doors. All those who were traumatized by Jaws, who were provoked by Seven Beauties, who pretended not to notice the blowjob happening a few rows behind, while the rest of the theater screamed in horror at The Omen. The Secret Agent is for them, for us, for everyone – those who love cinema most of all.

The Secret Agent is now playing in select theaters. It'll start expanding on December 5, as part of Neon's platform release plan.