The Secret Agent

Monday March 9 @ 7 pm

Crime / Drama / Mystery / Thriller
14A – 2hr 38min

Once in a while, you see a movie that doesn’t feel made, but extracted from a dreaming mind. It has a strong personality and visual style and moves to its own mysterious rhythms. It won’t go to you and hand over its meanings. You must go to it. That’s The Secret Agent, written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho.

Set in 1977 Brazil, roughly at the midpoint of a 21-year military dictatorship, The Secret Agent is a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a recreation of a time and place, with expressionistic and surreal flourishes that must be accepted on their own terms. Wagner Moura stars as Marcelo, a tall, bearded fellow with gentle energy and sad eyes. He arrives in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco, Brazil, in a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle. We don’t know why he’s come to Recife. We won’t know for a long time. You have to pick up on subtext in order to understand certain conversations. Marcelo and the other characters in his orbit try to avoid saying exactly what they mean, because someone might be listening.

Murder is everywhere. Some deaths are punishments, levied against the regime’s opposition. Others are byproducts of street crime. There’s a lot of overlap. Hired killers are free agents who will murder a stranger and dispose of the corpse—whether the client is the state, a corporation, or some random person with a grudge—then have a nice dinner and go to bed. This film is partly about how people accept a world where such things can happen, and learn to move within it.

The superb Brazilian actor Wagner Moura — who became famous in the U.S. in Narcos — stars as a research scientist called Marcelo, an innocent man on the lam for reasons we only learn later. He heads to Recife, a coastal city in northern Brazil, to pick up his young son from his late wife’s parents and then flee the country together. Marcelo takes refuge with Dona Sebastiana, a deliciously free-spoken septuagenarian who’s at once a real pistol and something of a saint. Her apartment house is a secret sanctuary for people in various types of trouble.

Like a political thriller from the 1970s Hollywood, The Secret Agent presents us with an X-ray of society from its highest reaches to its darkest corners. It’s hard to imagine a richer cast of characters, each individualized and respectfully given their humanity — be it the hitman who bristles at his employer’s offhand racism, the Jewish tailor scarred with World War II bullet holes, the smug tycoon getting rich off the the dictatorship, the secretary who has the hots for Marcelo, or Marcelo’s late wife, who appears in only one scene — but she, and that scene, are lacerating.

The cat-and-mouse chase that’s fueling the plot does boil over into a gnarly shootout (Mendonça’s approach to gore continues to be a thing of beauty), but The Secret Agent is consistently less interested in action than consequence, and less interested in scene than scenery. You can feel the filmmaker’s dream-come-true ecstasy at being able to recreate the golden age of Recife’s cinemas, which backdrop several key moments and tee up a recurring obsession with Jaws. You can feel the joy he gets from rendering the city’s streets in magnificent widescreen, and filling them with punch-buggies, bell-bottoms, and so many great Tropicália-accented songs that the critic sitting next to me spent the entire movie Shazam-ing every scene.

That joy is contagious enough to feed into the bittersweet story Mendonça wrote as a conduit for it, and to deepen the ultimate impact of its argument that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With The Secret Agent, Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.