Cinephiles who found themselves gripped by the chilling tale of the Brazilian dictatorship in this year’s Oscar winner I’m Still Here had best get ready to recover again with the stylishly gripping The Secret Agent. This unique neo-noir from director Kleber Mendonça Filho offers a disorienting, exhilarating, and dizzying blood-soaked account of the brutality that besieged a nation. The Secret Agent parks audiences into a violent wasteland in its opening images as Marcel (Wagner Moura) rolls into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He finds the car’s lemony hue upstaged by a splash of rusty red.
Just a few feet from the pumps, a corpse lies under a sheet of cardboard. His brains and a few bits of his skull stain the lot along with a gunky pool of dried blood. The stiff’s clearly been there a while, as noted by the bluish flesh protruding from beneath the cardboard shroud. It’s clear the dogs have been at him, too, but Marcel’s running on an empty tank and can’t chance what lies ahead on the open road. He tells the attendant to fill ’er up, escapes a run-in with the police with a pack of cigarettes, and floors the gas until he arrives in Recife.
Rolling into Recife, the city in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, puts him firmly in Mendonça Filho territory. The Brazilian master behind Bacurau and Neighbouring Sounds ensnares his fallible anti-hero in his signature web of cinema. He gives the era of the Fifth Republic an air of 1970s’ spy thrillers, rooting the espionage in an intriguing cocktail of gritty pragmatism and magical realism. It’s a film that constantly keeps one on edge, never quite knowing which elements of the story to trust. Much like Marcelo, a technology researcher in hiding, one surveys every inch of the story making sense of the pieces as the puzzle coalesces.
Besides spy guys with such bountiful chest hair that puts Sean Connery to shame, The Secret Agent also pays homage to 1970s’ cinema with its fiercest player: a shark. The mystery takes a surreal turn when a local cop fields a call from a researcher who’s discovered a leg in the belly of a shark. The problem, though, is that nobody at the hospital or morgue needs a leg. Recife finds itself in a feeding frenzy as a particularly violent run of Carnival festivities leaves the city in a bloodier wake than Bruce the shark’s rampage at Amity Island. And when the leg itself becomes a perpetrator of violence, Mendonça Filho plays his surreal secret weapon.
This film offers a love letter to cinema by reclaiming a violent history through the escapist lens that helps people endure and make sense of hard times. Mendonça Filho embeds the film with his indebtedness to cinema, as Marcelo visits his father-in-law in one of Recife’s grand cavernous movie houses, very much like the old haunts to which the director pays tribute in his extraordinary documentary Pictures of Ghosts . As Marcelo goes in and out of the projection booth, observing Brazilians enjoying their escape from reality, he sees life with an increasingly cinematic lens—which Mendonça Filho and cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova accentuate thrillingly with period perfect cameras and styles.
It turns out that Marcelo is something of a Bond figure in his own right. Besides being something of a womanizer at his new apartment where he waits with fellow “refugees,” he is also a man of secrets and aliases. His puts his research skills to the test, too, as he navigates city archives in search of his mother’s death certificate. He desperately seeks some confirmation that she existed, and that paper holds a key to his own fate.
Much like 007, though, Marcelo attracts trouble and his story haunts the archives as The Secret Agent spins its web. A cohort of nefarious baddies trails him, eager to ferret out and eliminate the man living a lonely quiet life amid the filing cabinets of bureaucracy. But for all the paperwork and procedural chatter, The Secret Agent evolves into a thrilling and enigmatic caper.
Fuelled by Moura’s electric performance, appropriately awarded at Cannes earlier this year, The Secret Agent has a cool swagger to its step. His performance embraces the man of mystery. Marcelo’s an observer and Moura lets his oft-moving eyes tell us about the researcher’s psychology, leaving it to viewers to discern whether paranoia or professional training guide his surveillance. The film provides little backstory about Marcelo’s life, too, and the tenderness with with he visits his son and grieves his late wife, speaks to a kind soul regardless of what he might or might not have done. After all, a string of people want to kill him. Wagner shows us what everyday people had to do to survive, oscillating different selves to evade the regime.
The spy game of the military state infiltrates every life that passes through the screen of The Secret Agent . Mendonça Filho asks how one makes sense of the web when it touches every corner of life. The answer arrives with a jolt of black humour as the director brings Marcelo’s story to another of Brazil’s movie theatres. This cinema, however, is a product of the present. Much like a historic Toronto cinema refashioned into a Shopper’s Drug Mart, this one imagines the space anew. It’s now a blood bank—a sick joke about the power of movies bathed in red in a land with a violent past.
