Producer: Emilie Lesclaux Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho Screenplay: Kleber Mendonça Filho Cast: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Tânia Maria, Gabriel Leone, Carlos Francisco, Alice Carvalho, Robério Diógenes, Hermila Guedes, Luciano Chirolli, Kaiony Venâncio, Igor De Araújo, Ítalo Martins, Laura Lufési, Udo Kier, Roney Villela, Isabél Zuaa, Licínio Januário, João Vitor Silva, Enzo Nunes, Aline Marta, Gregorio Graziosi and Buda Lira Distributor: Neon
Grade: B+
Even the title of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film is enigmatic—it makes you think the picture is an espionage thriller (which it is, in a way, but a way that’s indirect and deceptive); the eagle-eyed might spot the point in the film which discloses its wry meaning. Its protagonist, Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura), is a fugitive in 1977 Brazil, then under an oppressive military dictatorship. (“A time of great mischief,” a caption euphemistically tells us.) Traveling under the assumed name of Marcelo Alves to the northeastern seaside city of Recife, where he once led a technical research institute at the university, he stops at an isolated gas station in his VW Beetle, noticing the body of a would-be thief under a piece of carboard in the parking lot, occasionally pecked at by birds or sniffed by feral dogs.
But when a police car comes by, it’s to interrogate him rather than see to the corpse. The intrusive cop searches his car but then merely asks for a bribe—a contribution to the policemen’s fund for an ongoing Carnaval. Armando is able to fob the guy off with a pack of cigarettes and continues through the revelers to his destination, the Recife house of spunky senior Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a long-time liberal activist who takes in refugees like Armando; her other current guests are dentist Claudia (Hermita Guedes), Haroldo (Joâo Vitor Silva), and an Angolan couple, Thereza Vitória (Isabél Zuaa) and Antonio (Licínio Januário), with whom he naturally forms a bond.
Some of “Agent” is devoted to conversations among this group—in one memorable sequence, Dona Sebastiana talks about her long career in resistance to authority—and Armando and Claudia develop a relationship (she even takes care of a toothache). But his main interest is in reuniting with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), a tyke who’s been living with his maternal grandparents Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) and Lenira (Aline Marta Maia) since he had to go on the run following the tragic death of his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho). He also hopes to use a job at the governmental I.D. department arranged for him by a resistance leader Anísio (Buda Lira) to uncover information about the mother he barely knew.
But he has to act quickly. Powerful businessman Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) has hired two hitmen, ex-military man Augusto Borba (Roney Villela) and his protégé and stepson Bobbi (Gabriel Leone)—whose father Borba might have killed—to eliminate him, and they’ve in turn hired local thug Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio) to track him down. The vendetta stems from an episode in the past, when Ghirotti, then on the board of Eletrobrás, the country’s largest power company, visited the university in Recife along with his brutish son (Gregorio Graziosi). Ghirotti threatened to cut off funding for Armando’s institute, and at a dinner he and his son insulted Fátima, who responded in kind. It’s never explicitly stated whether Armando did something to harm Ghirotti’s influence in government, or Ghirotti had something to do with Fátima’s death, but both are possibilities. In a secret meeting arranged by Alexandre for Armando with Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), a resistance leader, she advises him that he must flee Recife as quickly as possible.
The situation is made more complex by the presence of Euclides (Robério Diógenes), Recife’s sleazy, corrupt chief of police who treats the man he knows as Marcelo Alves with unusual enthusiasm, even taking him along when he visits Hans (Udo Kier), a German expatriate whom he treats as a kind of showpiece: he believes the man to e a former Nazi and insists that he show off his “war wounds,” but in actuality Hans is a concentration camp survivor whose contempt for the policeman is evident. At the same time Euclides inadvertently lets Armando witness evidence of how he conducts official business to the benefit of the powerful when he conducts the questioning of a wealthy woman implicated in the death of her servant’s child in private while stifling the protests of the boy’s grieving mother. Euclides, it turns out, is also an old buddy of Borba, the man searching for Armando, who along with Bobbi is taking the opportunity to handle some other deadly business on the side.
One might say that the sharks are clearly circling Armando, and Mendonça takes up the metaphor in earnest by featuring sharks literally throughout. In an early scene Euclides and his sons Arlindo (Ítalo Martins) and Sérgio (Igor de Araújo) rush to a clinic where the medical examiner is removing a severed human leg from the carcass of a shark, a leg doubtlessly belonging to one of the victims of police brutality whose bodies are dumped into the sea. Later Arlindo and Sérgio bribe a morgue attendant to replace the leg with another, presumably to confuse identification. That leads to the film’s most surrealistic plot thread, public reaction to a wild rumor about a disembodied leg hopping about the city and attacking gay men—a fanciful way of talking about the police brutality everyone knows is happening but can’t openly discuss.
Sharks also dominate the imagination of young Fernando, who begs Alexandre to let him see “Tubarão”—Spielberg’s “Jaws”—which is currently playing at the Cinema São Luiz, where his grandfather is the chief projectionist. The boy is continually drawing copies of the beast shown on the picture’s posters and on the theatre’s marquee.
As if all this weren’t enough, after choreographing an extremely violent finale in which the three hitmen try to pull off Armando’s assassination, Mendonça suddenly shifts to the present, where he shows us that what we’ve been seeing has been derived—in part, at least—from Elza’s taped archive which included her conversations with Armando. The tapes are being transcribed by two young women, history researchers, one of whom—Flavia (Laura Lufési)—has provided the perspective from which we’ve witnessed some of the story. It’s here that Armando’s fate is revealed, not in some grand denouement but a simple news photo. It’s no wonder that the various threads the narrative has taken up over an epic span are not neatly tied up; we’re left to speculate about what happened to most of the characters during the remainder of the dictatorship, which gradually gave way to democratization that culminated in the elections of 1985.
Mendonça ends, however, with a visit by the curious Flavia to Recife to seek out the now-grown Fernando (also played by Moura), a doctor in a clinic near the site of the old cinema. After donating blood she has a conversation with him that serves as a microcosm, one suspects, of the memory, or lack thereof, many survivors have of the time of mischief in which Armando lived out his last days.
“The Secret Agent” is filled with memorable performances—those of Maria, Kier, Diógenes, Carvalho and Franciso, among others, are indelible—but it’s unquestionably Moura who, in his quiet, simmering way, holds the film together and keeps it from dissolving into a welter of individual fragments. Of course, Mendonça’s script and direction provide him with a solid basis. Mendonça is also responsible for the visual authenticity, drawing superlative work from production designer Thales Junqueira, costumer Rita Azevedo and cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova who, working with Mendonça and editors Eduardo Serrano and Matheus Farias, gives the film a suspenseful quality without resorting to tricks or diversions. One even must credit the effects team headed by Alexandre Boiron for devising the absurd look of the “hairy legs” sequences, as well as Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves for their spare but evocative score.
Mendonça’s film makes a striking, if very different, complement to Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here,” also set in the days of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which won the Best International Film Oscar last year. Always compelling, sometimes diverting and genuinely surprising, “The Secret Agent” might make it two for two.