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secret agent review
Artists: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leon, Tania Maria
Language: Portuguese with English subtitles
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Star Rating: ★★★★.5
Some movies like to cut to the chase very early. Not a single scene has been wasted. There is a storytelling intrigue that directs the subsequent scenes. Then comes a film like The Secret Agent from the mind of Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho. A film that starts with breadcrumbs of intrigue – both political and personal – and then slows down. Sharp but elusive, this is a story that is in no rush to confront what comes next. We expect to see it one way or the other. Yet, this sense of inevitability gives the film a dangerous unpredictability.
Base
We arrive in Brazil in 1977, billed as “the time of great mischief.” A man’s corpse is rotting near a rural gas station where Wagner Moura’s Armando pulls up in his bright yellow VW Beetle. We don’t know anything about him in these early scenes, even when he moves into a makeshift setup, hosted in Recife by a 77-year-old woman named Dona Sebastiana (a scene-stealing turn from Tania María).
It turns out that she is a widowed former teacher whose son Fernando is now living with his grandfather. Armando is also waiting for instructions as he takes a job at the identification office, where he searches for records that may be linked to his late mother. Meanwhile, two hitmen are hired to kill Armando. But there is more than meets the eye, as Armando will slowly discover, and so will we.
confident and unpredictable
There’s a surprising level of confidence in the way Mendonca has chosen to fill in the story’s gaps. Secret Agent is a genre-changing film marked by zigzagging subplots and eccentric stylistic flourishes. The more you try to catch it, the more it runs away from you and tempts you to follow. And so, you pay attention, you look closely, and fill in the details. At times it becomes Hitchcockian in the template of a thriller, while I was also reminded of the cleverness that is so evident in Antonioni’s works.
It’s a film that reflects a time filled with fear and uncertainty, but also the sheer ridiculousness of it all; The sweaty, anxious excitement of everyday acts of corruption. The hat tip of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and the way the morbid reference is incorporated into the story, is extremely humorous. Yet, The Secret Agent is also about how we remember the past and choose to define it. Midway through the story, the scene shifts to the present with Mendonça introducing two modern archivists. No matter what they hear or how they look at the newspaper, recorded history is like a stain, which can only be remembered like a hallucination.
A picturesque turn from Wagner Moura
Mendonça wants both anarchy and peace. At times, these two elements collide in this languid and almost novelistic film, held together by Wagner Moura’s magnetic presence. His performance is wonderfully animated and intoxicating, commanding attention with even the slightest changes in his expression.
The Secret Agent, a film of bold, epic scale and ambition, may seem like a series of transformations and revelations. It can also feel like a bitter pill of truth, balancing moments of shocking intensity, reminding us that history can never be contained in a single, homogeneous vessel. What an invigorating and transformative film Mendonca has made, which bears witness as well as records. This is a big achievement.
The Secret Agent screened at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival.
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