Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” holds shocking depth for a film as pulpy and often ridiculous as it is. A political thriller set amid the fascistic deluge that plagued Brazil in the 1970s, one would be forgiven for walking into the film believing this to be a cat-and-mouse espionage thriller, stocked with covert agencies and devious assassins indulging in clandestine skullduggery. But what “The Secret Agent” presents instead, as a balm against that kind of heightened cinematic drama, is something much more intimate and wrenching; the story of an apartment complex of people made refugees in their own country who are forced to wage a quiet, seemingly hopeless war with powerful interests wishing them dead for having the gall of existing in opposition to the rampant modernization of a homogenized, corporatized, and corrupt Brazil. Their opinions are not the right ones, their skin tone is not the perfect hue, their accent lacks the correct inflection; those are the crimes for which they are being hunted, rounded up, and shot in the street. As was the case with last year’s Oscar-nominated “I’m Still Here”, it is through the eyes of South American filmmakers that the U.S. is shown the most damning portraits of ourselves, shaped by the past, brought to life by art at its most defiant, and latched umbilical like to our very souls with a link that is equally potent, insightful, and bloody.
“The Secret Agent” follows Armando (the endlessly charming, Oscar-nominated, Wagner Moura) as he takes refuge in the town of Recife during the height of the Carnival Season, where bacchanal and murder go hand in hand. His son, Fernando, lives there with his grandparents, but Armando keeps his distance because there are powerful men searching for him. In another life, he was a technology expert who stood up to a powerful executive at his company, Electrobras, and is now in hiding for fear of retribution. At the same time, the corrupt Police Chief Eucllides and his two sons are called to the local Oceanographic Institute to investigate a shark that was pulled from the ocean with a whole human leg in its stomach; just one more odd bit of violence amidst a Carnival Season rife with almost one hundred deaths of innocents. Through his connections in the Resistance Underground, Armando moves into an apartment building run by a kindly older woman with a two-faced cat, Dona Sebastiana, who was once an anarchist/communist in Italy, and meets several other refugees who are being sheltered away from the watchful eye of the state. Little does he know, however, that the Electrobras Executive Director has hired a pair of hitmen to find and murder him, assassins who happen to have a personal connection with the Chief Eucllides. As these violent forces coalesce around him, Armando is forced to come to terms not just with his own potential murder but the death of a life his son might have had.
The film opens with Armando pulling into an out-of-the-way gas station where a dead body draws flies and wild dogs in the lot adjacent. The attendant explains that the dead man had been attempting to steal gas from the station, so one of the other attendants blasted him in the face and chest with a shotgun. Sadly, being Carnival season, the police seem uninterested in investigating until Ash Wednesday; so the rotting flesh is left to smolder in the sun. This image lingers throughout the rest of the story, of a forgotten life abandoned to the sniffing dogs and ravenous insects, a carnal reminder that the whole of a human person is just a bag of meat when the right tube is severed. There is a sense of unease that lingers at the edges of “The Secret Agent” that harmonizes with its good humor, rampant music, and charm. Writer/Director Kleber Mendonça Filho instills the filmmaking with a flair and reverence for Brazilian history, spirit, and folklore, leaning into the Carnival traditions, which are not too dissimilar to our own. The local newspapers that Armando reads seem giddy to proclaim the number of Carnival dead, ninety-one when our story begins, with no end in sight, as if reaching that elusive one hundred mark will trigger a national celebration. As with Mardi Gras, death hangs as a shroud just beyond the frivolity, the good cheer, and the drinking; the knowledge that the good times will roll for only so long before everything returns to ash, and perhaps the revelry is merely a smokescreen for something far more insidious lurking cold and lifeless just below the surface.
There is a sequence in the film where the disembodied leg that was pulled from the shark, which had taken on a cult-like status amongst the populace of Recife, is shown as a stop motion, cryptic style monster, hopping along the back alleys where gay men are peacefully cruising and smashing them to bits. We later learn that this is a story in the local newspaper, spreading the story of “Hairy Leg” to an eager populace. The style of the murderous leg is Burton-esque, intentionally absurd, played for laughs, and the inherent incongruity is striking in an otherwise straightforwardly earnest film. And yet, behind the artifice, the fun and the cheek, there is the sickly truth that perhaps this story, drummed up to sell newspapers, is in fact a covert way to laugh off the nearly one hundred dead bodies piling up over the course of the Carnival season. These people, killed, the most forgotten and disposable population by a fascist regime, are made in death to be little more than the fodder for consumerism; a product as addictive as soda and twice as corrosive. That corruption of memory, of the personhood of any friend or loved one, is central to the film’s conceit that perhaps the most subversive action imaginable is to treasure the memory of who a person was; to keep them wholly alive in your mind even when others wish them dead. The stories that we share again and again are the ones that retain their reality; the ones forgotten are left to decay in the dirt. As Armando tells Fernando when the boy asks if his mother will ever return home, “when we think about someone, it’s like having them with us.”
“The Secret Agent” is as lush and deeply felt as any film to come out this year; somehow as sprawling as it is specific; a labyrinth you cannot help but become consumed by. As a tribute to those who dared stand in defiance of the forces opposing human decency, it is a somber elegy; as funny and heartfelt as the finest eulogies always are. Death comes for us all, some in our sleep and others on a blood-soaked sidewalk; yet it is the defiance of memory that will sustain us long after we are gone. It’s the least we can do for those we have lost and those who have yet to live.
Remember, before you forget.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Secret Agent” is playing on Hulu.
