Something’s rotten in Brazil during Carnivale of 1977. That’s both metaphorical and literal. The literal rotten thing is a dead body under a piece of cardboard, attracting flies and mangy curs, lying outside a petrol station, where it was shot more than a week earlier. The metaphorical rotten thing is the police who won’t show up to collect it or otherwise deal with it, and when they do pull into the station in an apparent attempt to discharge their duties, it’s instead to shake down the man who’s stopped for petrol (Wagner Moura). When he tells them he’s just spent the last of his money on the petrol, they accept his last few cigarettes as payment instead.
This is the opening of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, and it’s a great direct immersion in a time and place, establishing a tone that will carry through the movie. There’s a blackly comic absurdity to many of the proceedings, interrupted on a few occasions by a louder form of absurdity, that derives from the abuses of authority and general corruption that pervaded the country at a time of great danger to its citizens, especially if they held the wrong views. This was in the midst of Brazil’s military dictatorship, and some citizens, such as Moura’s Armando Solimoes, had to seek refuge in other parts of the country where they assumed alternate identities, to avoid being disappeared.
The Secret Agent makes excellent use of a slow and languid build-up, establishing other environmental details like the new neighbours of the resettled Armando (now going by Marcelo) in the city of Recife, themselves political dissidents in hiding, and the obsessions gripping the local populace at the time, such as the movie Jaws, which has come back to cinemas after a human leg was found in the belly of a shark. The thing is, no humans had recently reported their leg missing, and this may well point back to the corrupt local police – a different corrupt police from the ones at the petrol station.
The Secret Agent is a hang-out movie for so long, in the best possible way, that it almost forgets to start establishing a plot. The plot, such as it is, involves Armando installed by his network in an office where they keep the country’s identity records, trying to find a record of his deceased mother. Armando is also being pursued by hit men (Gabriel Leone and Roney Villela), the result of a beef he had with the corrupt former government minister Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), with whom he clashed on his academic research. Even before becoming aware of this threat, Armando is trying to get out of the country with his son, Fernando, being looked after by his mother- and father-in-law in Recife, whose mother was one of the disappeared. Before that he’s got to get new passports issued with the help of a political resistance leader, Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), who is also recording interviews with Armando on his experience with Ghirotti.
Mendonca Filho presents all of this with an absolute mastery of what it would have felt like to be in this place at this time. He has such a wealth of great material, all of it housed within impeccable recreations of the vehicles and buildings of a sultry and squalid Brazil of 1977, that you are happy to just sit there and absorb anything and everything that unfolds in front of your eyes.
However, the title itself sets an expectation of something more rigorous on the narrative front. Armando is not, you’d know by now, a secret agent in the James Bond sense, and the suggestion that he is any sort of secret agent seems to come from the fact that he’s working at the identity office under an assumed identity. He’s not even really reporting on anything he’s discovering there.
But movies that do traditionally involve secret agents are, if anything, exceptionally complicated from a plotting perspective, not loose and disconnected as The Secret Agent is. When, for example, Elza finally starts interviewing Armando about the reason he’s on the run, so much time in the story has passed that we’ve almost forgotten there was a reason. Armando’s story about what happened with Ghirotti involves a lot of ambiguity as to the nature of the dispute, which could have used further explication, especially given the film’s hefty 160-minute running time.
It’s hard not to compare The Secret Agent to I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ acclaimed 2024 film that took place seven years earlier in the same military dictatorship. The two directors certainly don’t have the same goals with their films, but Salles arguably achieves his more effectively by focusing on the perspective and experiences of a single family, knowing only what they knew about what was happening around them. The more omniscience perspective of The Secret Agent – which introduces us to dozens of characters and follows many of their stories a little bit of the way, not always involving Armando – cries out for a slightly greater sense of cohesiveness.
There are parts of this film that just feel abrupt, that contribute to this feeling of wildness and wooliness. For example, at one point we are suddenly watching characters who are clearly in the 21st century, reviewing archival audio of these events – which, while fictitious, do have their basis in real occurrences from the time. Because Mendonca Filho had not established this as part of the film’s narrative structure, it takes us aback. Then there’s one episode that is total fantasy and is pitched at the highest possible level of slapstick, which is funny in its own right, to be certain, but which just spurs further contemplations about whether the writer-director has a grasp on everything he’s doing.
There’s no denying that the flavour of The Secret Agent is absolutely first rate, and it may be that only the more traditional and small-minded of us require the sort of structural rigour Mendonca Filho was never interested in giving us. Even though the film is more a collection of moments and keen observations than a satisfying narrative throughline, the world it observes is chilling, and pulsing with real life.
The Secret Agent opens today in cinemas.