DAN WEBSETER:
If the only movie you’d seen of the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho were his 2019 feature Bacurau no Mapa, you’d think the man —as an artist—might be a bit touched in the head.
Bacurau no Mapa, which stars such disparate screen presences as Sonia Braga and the German-born actor Udo Kier, is a strange, surrealistic take on Brazilian politics as set in a remote town that the authorities, for their own reasons, are trying to make disappear.
But then if you saw only his 2023 documentary Retratos Fantasmas—or Pictures of Ghosts—you might think he was a down-to-Earth dreamer whose sense of nostalgia is bound up in the old-school movies theaters that he spent his childhood going to in his coastal hometown of Recife.
Now, though, if you walk into a theater—or, more recently, click onto a streaming service such as Amazon Prime—and watch Filho’s latest creation, O Agente Secreto—or The Secret Agent—you might think that he’s a hard-nosed, politically-minded recorder of his country’s shady history of greed, corruption and murder.
Truth be told, it turns out that he’s all three. Because, one, The Secret Agent is set in Recife and is partly set in a movie theater. Two, the story that Filho tells reflects the murderous, authoritarian atmosphere that permeated most all of South America during the 1970s and ’80s, but especially in Brazil because of its military dictatorship. And three, one sequence of Filho’s film is so mind-bogglingly bizarre that… well, we’ll get to that in a minute.
The Secret Agent centers on Armando (played by Wagner Moura), a former professor who, facing an as-yet unnamed threat, returns to Recife. The year is1977, Brazil’s famous Carnival is going on and the streets are full of revelers. With his wife having died, and his son living with his wife’s parents, Armando—using the alias Marcelo—seeks out the elderly, pugnacious Dona Sebastiana (played by Tânia Maria), who is sheltering a number of other refugees.
Armando takes a job in Recife’s social registration office, which provides him both a cover and a way to get the false papers he needs to flee the country with his son. It also provides him access to city records so that he can find proof of his own mother’s birth—the only evidence of her existence.
But the ongoing threats to Armando hover ever everything, a sense of danger that dates from the film’s opening scene in which he is confronted by a pair of cops at a country service station while a man’s rotting corpse rests nearby.
In Recife, a corrupt police chief befriends him for reasons that Armando can’t understand but goes along with. This is the same police chief who takes pleasure in teasing a Jewish Holocaust survivor (played by Udo Kier) and whose officers are called to investigate a shark that has been landed with a human leg in its stomach—but again, more on that later.
The main threat, though, comes from a pair of hired killers who on orders from a vengeful businessman from Armando’s past sub-contract a hit on Armando. That their mission fails spectacularly demonstrates well that even, and maybe especially, corrupt regimes aren’t competent in all things.
If some of the middle section of The Secret Agent seems to drag, the sequence in which the assassin locates Armando—but then gets into a shootout with the police chief’s cohorts—moves with the quick and surprising efficiency of a Mission: Impossible episode.
Overall, though, Filho’s intent is less to entertain than to remind us that nothing in Brazil under Army control was safe to those who in any way are perceived as a threat. And even though he has abandoned his long hair, Armando’s Che Guevara-type beard marks him as just such a threat.
As is, weirdly enough, the leg that the shark devoured. Channeling his Bacurau no Mapa sensibility, Filho films the disembodied leg hopping through a city park, kicking at gay men attempting to hook up. In a movie that is filled with so much potential horror, Filho thus gives us an emotional respite: sometimes, he seems to be saying, the only way to face up to horror is to laugh madly at the dark.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.