As befits the suave simplicity of its title, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent is a film that makes itself very easy to like but very hard to truly know. A novelistic, impressionistic trip through the corruption and state-sanctioned violence and intimidation of late ‘70s Brazil, it’s part paranoid thriller, part familial drama, and part a history lesson reckoning with the country’s heinous recent past. It’s all pulled off with freaky surrealism and endless swathes of gorgeous colour that keeps you consistently off balance, anchored by a truly magisterial central performance from Wagner Moura.
Moura plays Marcelo, a widower and former university professor with a specialism in energy production who is currently on the lam from the government not because he’s any particular sort of radical but because he managed to mightily piss off a powerful minister on a personal level, who is now bearing a lethal grudge. His escape brings him to his in-laws’ hometown of Recife, where a local resistance sect puts him up and gets him a job that also, with some luck, manages to get him in the good books of the cheerfully corrupt local law enforcement.
It’s a plot that looks like it might get knotty, and Filho does stack it with moving parts, from Marcelo’s plan to get himself and his young son out of Brazil altogether to the duo of nasty bastard assassins on the minister’s payroll sent after him to the plights of all Marcelo’s fellow Recife ‘refugees’. Yet, it ends up actually unfolding, if not predictably, straightforwardly and in an easy to parse manner, layers of complexity instead added on a more emotional level, especially in the occasional flash forwards to the present day that give the ‘70s story a whole new context but also introduce a strange arm’s length emotional distance. It’s still all very involving, but if you’re expecting a straight-up Brazilian noir, The Secret Agent might leave you feeling a little baffled.
What never fails to convince, though, is Moura in the lead. He’s just incredible, easily one of the best performances of the year; layered and sad with a charisma that is both effortless and totally commanding, standing head and shoulders above what is already a very charming ensemble cast. A late-on sequence in which Marcelo uses his wits to turn hostile agents of the Brazilian state against one another is played to perfection and sets up The Secret Agent’s most heart-in-mouth set-piece of a gruesomely bloody cat-and-mouse hunt that takes the ‘life is cheap’ dread that permeates the whole film and finally brings it to visceral life.
Violence here is brief but profoundly impactful, the ‘action’ sequences of a piece with the other surreal interludes Filho frequently injects. There’s a two-headed cat in Marcelo’s apartment, a man-eating shark is the talk of the town, a German Jew who fled persecution is mistaken for a Wehrmacht veteran by an awestruck police chief, and a malevolent severed leg is seen bouncing around on its own and kicking terrified passersby with extraordinary force, Evil Dead-style. It’s all unforgettably unnerving, made especially searing by the gorgeous visuals. Rich and sumptuous colours, beautiful old cars, and pitch-perfect costuming and set design bring irresistible life to ‘70s Brazil even as dark forces choke the country.
Brazil’s answer to Bondor Bourne The Secret Agent is not (though if you do want to see Moura in that mode, check out the Elite Squad series) – in fact, it’s barely even a spy or mystery story at all. Instead, Filho here has crafted a cinematic version of an emotional response to repression that it can be hard to put words to. Thoughtless death roams the colour-saturated streets while family histories can never fully coalesce against a wall of hard-won silence and disinformation – though the story is easy to follow, the world it takes place in has had the sense shot out of it, a bizarre yet compelling place in which to spend a luxurious 160-odd minutes.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 