Kleber Mendonça Filho’s documentary Pictures of Ghosts saw the Brazilian filmmaker reminiscing about the cinemas he frequented as a child and young adult in his coastal hometown of Recife. His latest, the propulsive thriller The Secret Agent, at first suggests a film from a bygone era, its ’70s-set tale of institutional corruption and surveillance recalling the likes of Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View.
The film, which begins with a title card that cheekily establishes the 1977 setting as “a time of great mischief,” hatches a byzantine plot centered around a widowed ex-tech researcher, Armando (Wagner Moura), who’s been reduced to living in hiding ever since his leftist political sentiments put him on the radar of Brazil’s military dictatorship. More broadly appealing than Mendonça Filho’s past films, The Secret Agent is still unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle.
Returning to Recife in order to be closer to his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), he takes refuge among a group of other political dissidents housed by the spunky 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) while working a job at the state identification archives for cover. But just as he’s settling into his new life, Armando learns that two hitmen, Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), have arrived in town to kill him. They’re operating under the orders of a federal official, Ghirotti, whom Armando once had a series of altercations with following the gutting of public funding for the research project that Armando was managing.
Recife has been the setting of much of Mendonça Filho’s work since 2012’s Neighboring Sounds, and here he creates a portrait of a bustling beachfront pseudo-paradise where danger lurks around every corner and ordinary people are disappeared with no warning. From the ’70s-era fashion and vehicles to the egg-shaped telephone booths in which Armando and others often take cover while making sensitive calls, the period detail in The Secret Agent is nothing short of transportive. What’s more, the city is also fully in the midst of carnival celebrations, adding an extra layer of head-spinning cacophony to the frenzied machinations of the plot.
While Armando’s tale remains the focal point, The Secret Agent’s sprawling canvas encompasses a multitude of other colorful characters. Notable among them is a weary old German refugee (Udo Kier) who’s regularly harassed by a boorish group of corrupt local officials who are attempting to sniff out details about Armando’s past, as well as a resistance figure, Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), who suggests a character out of a chic Euro-crime spy film as she promises to facilitate fake passports for Armando and his son. Meanwhile, Armando’s jovial father-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), who’s been Fernando’s guardian in the father’s absence, acts as a necessary support system for our protagonist, while managing a magnificent old cinema which ends up doubling as a covert meeting space for political refugees.
It’s at this grand locale that Mendonça Filho lovingly depicts the moviegoing culture of yore. When Armando first visits Alexandre at this place of work, The Omen is the feature attraction, drawing hordes of locals hungry for the seat-jumping thrills of a Hollywood horror extravaganza—even a little illicit sexual activity, with Armando humorously witnessing at one point a not-so-inconspicuous blowjob-in-action as he looks in on the rapt audience from the projection booth. At the same time, Jaws looms large throughout the film, as the young Fernando desperately tries to convince both his father and grandfather to take him to see it, which they both argue will give him nightmares. “I already have nightmares,” Fernando protests.
And nightmares play a prominent, sometimes surreal role throughout The Secret Agent, beginning with the dreams of marauding carnival figures that keep jolting Armando awake in the middle of the night. Elsewhere, Jaws is evoked in a side plot about a severed leg being pulled out of a shark’s stomach. Later, the leg twitches and comes alive of its own accord, escaping from the morgue to go on a delirious killing spree, including literally kicking to death a group of gay men cruising in a local park. This patently unreal sequence of events is nonetheless breathlessly reported on in the local papers—in a direct reference to the real-life urban legend of the “hairy leg” that censored journalists would write about as a sort of code to indicate when police violence against marginalized groups had occurred.
These wildly entertaining diversions shake up the film’s traditional crime-movie trappings, bringing it closer to the fantastic happenings of Mendonça Filho’s bizarro neo-western Bacurau. Yet The Secret Agent gets back to business during its finale, in which Armando finally meets his would-be assassins face to face. The filmmaker stages a wonderfully Hitchcockian anxiety-inducer of a set piece where Armando ducks and weaves through his workplace and uses his wits to outsmart the ruthless goons on his tail. Yet just when you think the film is headed toward an expected climax for this sort of genre exercise, it stunningly flips the script into a bittersweet coda that threads a poignant emotional current through generations.
Brief flash-forwards to the present day are interspersed throughout The Secret Agent, depicting researchers piecing together the exact circumstances of what happened to Armando. The film concludes with this research being presented to a grown Fernando (also played by Moura), who’s now a doctor at a blood bank housed in a building that was once a movie theater. Alas, Fernando has seemingly grown comfortable with the ambiguity surrounding what happened to his father and doesn’t seem to care much about reflecting on his tumultuous upbringing. The one memory he does cherish, though, is finally getting to see Jaws, and that when he did, his nightmares about the film ceased. In the slippery, merciless world of The Secret Agent, sometimes the truth sets one free and sometimes it only causes more pain.
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