Even if you aren’t familiar with South American history, the vivid opening moments of The Secret Agent will still reveal that something isn’t right in the world of this ‘70s-set Brazilian thriller. At a rural gas station, a corpse rots on the ground just feet from the pumps; the cops are too busy with the chaos of Carnival to do anything about a single dead body, which is, well, already dead. Plus, there are political dissidents to hunt down and bribes to collect. This first scene is one of the best of the year: an unsettling master class in showing without telling and immediately drawing your audience into the world you’ve created. And while The Secret Agent does take place in something that resembles the real world with tactile details of the smoky, sweaty era that add authenticity, writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho brings the same magical realist, genre-bending approach that he did to his earlier work in Bacurau. In The Secret Agent, he again comments on Brazil’s past and present, while incorporating wild elements in with the history to create something wholly unexpected.
Mendonça Filho parcels out information judiciously; we meet our fictional protagonist, Marcelo Alves (Wagner Moura), at that gas station in the film’s first few minutes, but we don’t learn what has caused him to be a target for both the military dictatorship and contact killers until much later. The director doesn’t seem especially interested in making everything make sense — especially not quickly — but that doesn’t mean that we don’t buy into what he’s put on screen. Much of the credit for that feeling of authenticity goes to Mendonça Filho for his precision in creating his version of 1977 Brazil, but Moura is jaw-droppingly good as Marcelo, making him feel like a real person in every moment he’s on screen.
Marcelo has returned to his hometown of Recife, where he hides away under an assumed name in a building owned by Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), an old woman who welcomes a variety of political refugees. He reunites with his parents who are taking care of his young son after the death of Marcelo’s wife and the boy’s mother, and he hopes to escape the country with the boy soon, but a pair of father-son hired killers (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) are getting closer to finding him.
Meanwhile, a dead shark is found with a human leg in its belly, but the leg’s adventures don’t end there. The Secret Agent doesn’t feel quite as unhinged as Bacurau (what possibly could, really?), but there are some truly WTF moments that I won’t spoil here and I cannot stop thinking about. These elements keep it from feeling like a standard political thriller or historical drama. We’ve gotten plenty of good offerings in those categories, like the great paranoid thrillers of the ‘70s and last year’s Oscar-winning foreign language feature I’m Still Here (which was also about the Brazilian military dictatorship). By contrast, this feels like something we haven’t seen before, and that only could have come from the fucking bonkers brain of Mendonça Filho.
Even if you removed all of the oddities and kept The Secret Agent grounded in realism, it would still be an impeccably crafted film. With split diopter shots, split screens, and wipe transitions appearing early on, Mendonça Filho was clearly influenced by Brian De Palma. The approach feels appropriate to both the setting and the subject matter. However, he puts his own stamp on the visuals; the camera focuses on unexpected details and adds to the sense that we don’t know where either the camera or the film is going. With so much mainstream cinema feeling like it’s following a formula, it’s remarkable to watch something that refuses to follow those conventions.
Yet The Secret Agent isn’t all style and no substance. As in Bacurau, Filho is commenting on contemporary politics in Brazil, even though this film is largely set almost 50 years ago. The opening titles describe the time as “a period of great mischief,” and strife and corruption are rampant. Marcelo is mostly an average man doing what seems like a largely unremarkable thing that attracted the eyes of the wrong people. That’s the danger of these types of governments: normal citizens become victims for simply living their lives. With The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho is challenging us not to forget these people or the crimes committed against them by their governments.
A-
“The Secret Agent” is out Wednesday in select theaters.
