“The Secret Agent,” Reviewed: A Brazilian Political Thriller Teeming with Life

“The Secret Agent” is a political thriller that’s also perhaps the year’s most profuse and populous movie, overflowing with sharply drawn characters who fill the screen with daring action and ardent purpose (whether honorable or corrupt). The movie’s writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, crafts a tight story with startling freedom, leaping between characters in order to conjure their fateful interconnections, while giving them all, persecuted and persecutors alike, an identity and a voice. In the process, he brings history to life with bracing immediacy—a feat all the rarer for the audacious twists of cinematic form with which he renders the movie an act of archival reclamation. The man from the gas station, a middle-aged scientist called Marcelo (Wagner Moura), reaches his home town of Recife, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, during Carnaval, and he finds the city in a state of festive agitation. Arriving at the apartment building where he’ll be hiding out, he gets immediately soaked by gleeful kids with improvised water guns. But the sombre stakes of his trip quickly become clear when, moments later, he’s welcomed by Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the den mother of the safe house, where she’s lodging others in similar circumstances. Sebastiana discloses her sympathies at once, asking him whether he had trouble en route with “the pigs.” Seventy-seven years old and a voluble, plainspoken, fiercely principled rebel fixer, she introduces Marcelo, who’s a widower, to a group of new neighbors, especially a woman named Cláudia (Hermila Guedes), a professor of dentistry, with whom Sebastiana instantly tries to pair him off. Then, when the neighbors are out of sight, she gives him some money, plus instructions for his new life, expressing her commitment to his cause with a furtive zipping of her lips. The movie is divided into three parts, each with an enticing title that reveals and conceals just enough. The first, “The Boy’s Nightmare,” involves Marcelo’s fraught homecoming in the shadow of grief over his wife’s death—and his reunion with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who has been staying in Recife with his maternal grandparents, Lenira (Aline Marta Maia) and Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), a projectionist at a local movie theatre. Bereft of his mother and separated from his father, the boy suffers from nightmares, but his immediate concern is altogether more common: Alexandre’s movie house has been showing “Jaws,” and Fernando—who’s obsessed with ads for the film—begs for permission to see it. Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), heads straight from his own Carnaval revels, covered in confetti and lipstick stains, to see the limb at an oceanography lab, where he’s joined by two other officers—his grown sons, Arlindo (Ítalo Martins) and Sérgio (Igor de Araújo). Euclides hopes to keep the discovery out of the press for reasons that soon become evident: a pair of hit men, a stepfather (Roney Villela) and stepson (Gabriel Leone), are working in town with the police’s tacit approval, dumping bodies from a bridge into the sea below. However censored the Brazilian press was at the time, disappearances are still making the news, including that of a student who hasn’t been seen in several days—the dismembered victim, it’s hinted—who’s the subject of an article that appears in the film’s second part, “Identification Institute.” The title refers to a government office for issuing I.D. cards, where Marcelo, now neatly dressed and well groomed, begins an office job arranged by a well-placed sympathizer (Buda Lira). Marcelo has an additional motive for working there: by searching the institute’s archive, he hopes to fill in long-troubling blanks in his family background. At the office, the story menacingly triangulates, with Euclides turning up as part of an underhanded ploy to help a rich woman while denying a poor one justice. He befriends Marcelo—even as, during nocturnal rounds, he pals around with the hit men. Mendonça loves process, and in “The Secret Agent” he draws out scenes at length, unfolding games of concealment and evasion with understated precision and overwhelming tension, dispensing harrowing information with pinpoint restraint. His filmmaking teems with memorably eccentric details that reverberate with thematic significance. One of the movie’s most striking scenes is a curious digression stemming from a triviality—a telegram that Marcelo sends to a benefactor (Marcelo Valle) whose phone is likely tapped. Mendonça shows the telegram at each stage of its journey, as one clerk takes the message, another transmits it, a third prints it at the other end, and then a messenger carries it folded between his fingers to the sympathizer’s office. The oddly jaunty sidebar is capped by a chilling surprise: the addressee is shocked to find that the telegram has already been opened. Paranoia suffuses the film without showiness or bombast—there are no distorting angles, no dunning musical cues. The ambient terror emerges instead in the careful behavior of characters in the crosshairs, as in two lengthy and finely wrought scenes—the movie’s mightiest emotional pillars—that show Marcelo talking with others under suspicion. In the first, he’s met, in a covert location, by a woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who informs him that he’s facing a death threat. He, in turn, tells her the story behind his persecution, a tale involving some of the authoritarian regime’s predatory profiteers, and, in so doing, offers a poignant portrait of an erstwhile ally, his late wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho). In the other such scene, residents of the safe house hold a spontaneous support-group session, during which Sebastiana, the matriarch, is asked about an old photo on her mantel and responds with an aria-like reminiscence of her grimly romantic political past. Similarly, Mendonça reconstructs the city at large with fervor for its outward vigor and its inner life. The movie theatre where Alexandre works is a café-type hangout and an informal town square, but many of its everyday happenings harbor secrets, whether gruesome or heartening. In the film’s urban settings, which feature throngs of extras, day-to-day business gets drawn into the drama, packing Mendonça’s deftly composed widescreen images with passionate tumult. Even when showing small groups indoors, the director’s full frames convey a sense of turmoil, which is amplified by the cast’s vividly expressive performances—especially that of Moura, who carries the film with a star turn of suave determination, thoughtful energy, and preternatural calm in the face of mortal danger. Amid escalating violence in the film’s third part, “Blood Transfusion,” Marcelo remains the still center, living in hiding in his home town, his identity split between public and private guises, his mind pressured to the breaking point by the effort of keeping up appearances. In spite of all this, he is endowed with an unshakably principled core, which Mendonça distills into an iconic physical symbol—an old-fashioned cassette deck that gains totemic power as it preserves Marcelo’s testimony. The resulting tapes give rise to a coup de cinéma of breathtaking audacity and simplicity, a leap in time that brings silenced voices back to life. With this device, Mendonça telegraphs a righteous indignation that’s nonetheless hopeful, a vision of openhearted generosity and multigenerational solidarity in the face of ruthless authority, then and now. ♦