The Secret Agent

Set predominantly in 1977 Brazil, “The Secret Agent” begins with Armando (Wagner Moura), a fugitive from the country’s military dictatorship and going by the name Marcel, stopping at a rural gas station. He can’t help but notice a dead body lying beneath a piece of cardboard, flies buzzing overhead. The station attendant explains the person was shot dead by his colleague for attempting to steal some motor oil, and though he called the cops days ago, they have yet to arrive. Finally, they do, though not to deal with the dead body, to which they pay little attention, but to shake down Armando. It’s a sequence in which writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho effectively introduces both his movie’s world and tone, at once deadly serious and darkly comic. And though the corpse bearing witness, so to speak, to this squeeze put me in mind of noted philosopher Harry Lime’s observation that the dead are happier dead, “The Secret Agent” hardly proves a grim slog in fatalism. It’s a historical political thriller but more than that, it’s an absolute thrill to watch, utterly alive and willing to meander its own narrative nooks and crannies rather than just stick to the main path, finding light in the darkest places, like the human leg inside the tiger shark that washes ashore. I’m not even going to tell you what happens with that human leg, you’ll never guess, unless you already know Brazilian folklore. 

Armando is a one-time university technology researcher from the northeastern Brazil city of Recife who ran afoul of a corrupt, powerful industrialist. We see this happen in flashback, a contentious meeting turned physical confrontation, stemming not even so much from Armando’s refusal to play the game as his standing by while his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) talks back, such a flouting of society’s hierarchies that it’s a death sentence. Indeed, Fátima winds up dead under mysterious circumstances, and in a present-day scene, when Armando and Fátima’s son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), expresses how much he misses his mother, his dad explains that when they call up a memory of her, it’s like she’s alive again, right there with them. This observation is crucial, transforming that lone glimpse of Fátima in flashback into something so much more than mere backstory: an embodiment of the power of memory. And so, as “The Secret Agent” begins with Armando returning to Recife, it is in part to search for the birth certificate of his own mother, one of whom he has almost no memory, seeking to literally and figuratively reclaim it before it is lost forever.

That is not the only reason he has returned to Recife, summoned by revolutionaries who warn his life is in danger, hunted by assassins dispatched by the industrialist to settle their score once and for all, and helping him prepare to flee the country. He stays in an apartment complex run by the charismatic Dona Sebastien (Tânia Maria), a sympathizer to the cause, running an underground network of political refugees seeking the necessary papers to flee. She’s a landlord but she also briefly plays matchmaker, immediately seeking to pair Armando with Cláudia (Hermila Guedes), improbably and joyfully crossing “Casablanca” with “Melrose Place.” It underlines a sense of community in defiance of displacement and in one scene, all of Dona’s residents gather in the same room to tell their stories. Moura is magnificent here, as he is throughout, his air guarded but soulful, bringing to life the arduous nature of leading a double life, of suppressing who you are to stay alive. 

Armando’s intent, however, is not just to escape Brazil but to bring along Fernando, currently living with his grandfather, a movie theater projectionist. That occupation is not mere window dressing. “The Secret Agent” functions as a love letter to 70s cinema, not merely in the vintage camera equipment Filho has employed but in how movies themselves shrewdly intertwine with the larger narrative, moving pictures of a piece with the famed Carnival running concurrent with the movie’s present-day action, relief in the ritual. Indeed, some movies like to hammer home saccharine notions of the magic of the movies, but rarely have I seen a movie so intrinsically and spiritedly evince that old chestnut. Filho uses “Jaws,” which has only just come to Recife, to unify his themes of fear and memory, and via the tawdry exploits captured through a projection window during a screening of “The Omen,” he flippantly evokes the, uh, pleasure of moviegoing in the first place.

The neatest filmmaking trick that Filho pulls, however, is one that I am almost hesitant to divulge, so extraordinary is the recontextualization of everything when it happens, even if it is also simultaneously essential to making complete sense of “The Secret Agent.” If it mostly takes place in 1977, and occasionally flashes back, it also flashes forward to our current era in which we see university students unearth and listen to archived recordings of Armando recounting his saga for those old Recife revolutionaries. When the first flash-forward happens, it’s jarring in the best way possible, suddenly making you realized that what you have been watching up to that point is not, in fact, the present but the past. And if the intent of dictatorships, authoritarians, and any other aspirant oppressive regimes the world over is to erase and rewrite the past, this device evokes history and memory as the ultimate form of resistance, an idea punctuated by Moura’s unexpected dual role wrapping up the two-hours-and-forty-minutes with witty flair. The revolution lives on.