The Secret Agent – first-look review

When Marce­lo (Wag­n­er Moura) first arrives in Dona Sebastiana’s build­ing, he is greet­ed by a curi­ous cat whose head is split into two ful­ly formed faces, each fac­ing an oppo­site direc­tion. In a way, Brazil is much like that cat, con­stant­ly look­ing at two real­i­ties at once: the past that has shaped it, and the future it resilient­ly stum­bles towards.

Kle­ber Men­donça Filho’s The Secret Agent first finds Wag­n­er Moura’s char­ac­ter arriv­ing back in his home­land of Recife after a stretch in São Paulo. Dri­ving a bright yel­low VW Bee­tle, the man’s first glimpse of his home state is an omi­nous one: a body stretched in front of a petrol sta­tion, blood and oil seep­ing into the arid grounds of the North­east. It is a sign of what is to come, a gnarly omen in gnarly times when vio­lence is not only com­mon but sanc­tioned. It is 1977, and Brazil has just crossed the halfway mark of a dic­ta­tor­ship that would last anoth­er eight years but come to define much of the country’s iden­ti­ty for the decades that come.

The Secret Agent arrives two years after Filho’s Pic­tures of Ghosts, an inti­mate film about the movie palaces of his beloved Recife. That project would take sev­en years, some of them shared with the writ­ing of his lat­est. This inter­sec­tion is ever felt, the two works seep­ing into one anoth­er, coex­ist­ing in a land of mem­o­ry where one is made time machine, the oth­er a paracosm.

Alexan­dre, the pro­jec­tion­ist of Recife’s Cin­e­ma São Luiz and a promi­nent fig­ure in Pic­tures of Ghosts, returns here as part fic­tion, part truth. Played by Car­los Fran­cis­co with the same lop­sided limp and open ter­ra­cot­ta shirt, the fic­tion­al Alexan­dre is Marcelo’s father-in-law and, most impor­tant­ly, grand­fa­ther to his young boy, Fer­nan­do. The man is the gate­way to bring­ing Filho’s beloved cin­e­ma to the thriller, a movie palace whose labyrinthine cor­ri­dors and small hid­den rooms prove the per­fect loca­tion for Marcelo’s secret testimonies.

The rea­son for those tes­ti­monies, giv­en by the elu­sive man to the even more elu­sive Elza (Maria Fer­nan­da Cân­di­do), is at the heart of this polit­i­cal thriller that drinks from the foun­tain of the clas­sic Amer­i­can genre and fierce­ly spits back its Brazil­ian coun­ter­part. Like Bacu­rau, the film is shot in anamor­phic Panav­i­sion, and just like Bacu­rau, it har­ness­es the speci­fici­ties — and his­to­ry — of the for­mat to pay homage to the great clas­sics Fil­ho per­haps once watched at the same screens Marce­lo peeks at through the pro­jec­tion booth win­dow where sweat drips onto celluloid.

Filho’s cinephil­ia is stitched through The Secret Agent both dieget­i­cal­ly and non-dieget­i­cal­ly. It is present in the world of the film through Fernando’s draw­ings of Steven Spielberg’s night­mare-induc­ing poster for Jaws and the São Luiz, where Richard Donner’s The Omen sends cus­tomers run­ning out in pan­ic attacks and John Guillermin’s King Kong is teased on the mar­quee. But it is also heav­i­ly present in the film’s con­struc­tion, with Evge­nia Alexandrova’s stun­ning cin­e­matog­ra­phy — mark­ing Filho’s first fic­tion fea­ture with­out fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Pedro Sotero — gnaw­ing at the wide frame of Panav­i­sion to evoke a Bri­an de Pal­ma-esque ten­sion and play­ing with depth to ampli­fy a sense of foreboding.

In this, The Secret Agent is also self-ref­er­en­tial, not only in its umbil­i­cal con­nec­tion to Pic­tures of Ghosts, but in how Fil­ho revis­its cen­tral themes and aes­thet­ic prod­dings of his pre­vi­ous work to con­struct his bois­ter­ous thriller. You have the feel­ing of com­mu­ni­ty and cama­raderie of Neigh­bor­ing Sounds, with Sebastiana’s refugee com­mune prov­ing a bustling micro­cos­mos of shared loves, joys, and grief; much like Aquar­ius, this is a film def­er­en­tial to the pre­cious­ness of belong­ing, of root­ing one­self in a home that goes beyond the prover­bial; and the riotous vio­lence and punk of Bacu­rau is here once more, with the direc­tor chop­ping at limbs and skin and bone alike, explod­ing and tear­ing and cut­ting with deli­cious mercilessness.

The film­mak­er reen­lists some key repeat cre­ative part­ners to realise this ambi­tious recre­ation of 1970s Recife. Pro­duc­tion design­er Thales Jun­queira makes cocoons out of safe homes, lin­ing shelves with pre­cious sou­venirs and knick-knacks, each in itself a por­tal to anoth­er world, anoth­er time. Bureau­crat­ic offices become escape rooms, over­stuffed and aus­tere, the click-clack­ing of type­writ­ers merg­ing into an eerie count­down. Cos­tume design­er Rita Azeve­do fash­ions Moura after the Brazil­ian flag, with yel­low graph­ic tees, blue polos, and green shirts com­pos­ing a wardrobe that feels more con­fronta­tion­al than patriotic.

But The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and fea­si­bly Filho’s most refined, out­right auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of his­to­ry as an after­life with a ter­rif­ic encap­su­la­tion of the kind of hope­less­ness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching long­ing of a future con­demned to remain pos­si­bil­i­ty. The large ensem­ble cast, plur­al and charm­ing and ever-inter­est­ing to look at and lis­ten to, crowns a film that grabs at the fab­ric of a peo­ple with the con­fi­dent, hun­gry hands of those who love it.

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