The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of “The Secret Agent”

Swimming With Sharks: Review of The Secret Agent

★★★★

By Geoff Carter

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

Some movies are great fun and don’t try to be anything more. They grab you by the lapels and take you with them into galaxies far, far away, or on fantastic quests for magic rings, or put you in the driver’s seat of streamlined missiles that look like Formula 1 racing cars. Films can do that and more. They can make us fall in love, scare the hell out of us, inspire us, or enthrall us. Some even make us think. Over the hundred years feature films have been being across the world, you think we’d have seen everything, but some movies enter territory of the human experience that is unexplored or even unimagined. 

The Secret Agent, written and directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho, does exactly that. A neo-noir political thriller that takes place during the authoritarian Brazilian military rule of the 1977, this movie is not only a great suspense film but a glorious excursion into the tangled tapestry of life itself, taking sideways detours into the comic, the political, the surreal, and the unconscious. Above all, however, it is a great suspense film.

The opening sequence sets the tone. Armando (Wagner Moura) pulls his bright orange Volkswagen beetle into a secluded gas station and sees a body covered in cardboard a few yards away from the pumps. The attendant explains the dead man attempted to steal oil and was gunned down by the night clerk, who subsequently fled to carnival, and that he has been waiting for the police for three days. 

A police car pulls up, but the officers are not interested in the body. One approaches Armando, asks for his license registration and searches the car. All the while, Armando complies calmly, but the tension mounts as he watches the cop, whose intentions are unknown. He finally asks Armando for a donation to the Policeman Carnival Fund but settles for Armando’s cigarettes. A carful of costumed revelers on their way to carnival starts to pull into the gas station but keeps going—probably after seeing the police. The cops leave as the owner of the gas station chases away a pack of dogs going after the body. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the fear and violence of the times, the ever-present specter of death, and the surreal juxtaposition of danger with the sudden intrusion of the surreal.

Armando reaches his destination of the town of Recife, where he meets up with Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria) who runs a refuge for dissidents. She gives him the name of Marcelo and, with the help of her organization, finds him a job at the Identification Center. Armand has gone to Recife to see his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) who has been living with his in-laws since his wife died. Armando/Marcel meets fellow dissidents Claudia (Hermila Guedes), Angolan refugees Tereza Vittoria (Isabel Zuua) and her husband Antonio (Licino Januario), and others, and moves into the daughter of Dona Sebastiana’s daughter, which he discovers he will be sharing with a peculiar two-faced cat.

The boy Fernando is absolutely fascinated with the movie Jaws, but his grandfather Sr Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) refuses to let him see it because the poster gives the boy nightmares. At the Identification Center, Armando meets local police chief Euclides (Roberio Diogenes) and his two sons and is disgusted by the man’s arrogance. He is especially repulsed when the three take him to visit Hans (Udo Kier) who they harass because they think he’s a Nazi, although, in truth, Hans is a Holocaust survivor.

Euclides and his sons are called to investigate the discovery of a tiger shark with a human leg in its stomach. They take the leg away for investigation but end up—for undisclosed but easily surmised reasons—throwing it into the river. In a completely surreal turn, the leg comes to life and starts attacking gay men having sex in a public park, (a depiction of an actual news story during that time which was thought to be a coded reference to illicit police activity censored by the government), but in the complicated texture of this cinematic universe, this narrative twist not only fits but seems inevitable.

At one point about midway through the film, Eletrobas executive Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) hires hitmen Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) to kill Armando. In the meantime, Armando/Marcelo visits chief dissident Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido) is recording his history with Ghirotti, detailing the man’s corruption. Elza tells him that there is a contract out on him and that she will arrange for him to leave the country. Augusto and Bobbi hire another hit man, Vilmar (Kaiony Venancio) to take care of Armando. 

The last sequence of the film features Flavia (Laura Lufesi) who has been researching Armando’s story. Fascinated, she seeks out this son Fernando (Wagner Moura) to learn more about the family. He tells her he has no memory of his father but fondly recalls seeing the Jaws with his grandfather.

The Secret Agent is a deeply immersive film that pulls you into the depths of its particular universe but it is more than that. The length and breadth of the immersion transcends the outer reality of 1977 Brazil. While the fashions, the music, the pop culture (Jaws, Hands Across America poster, The Omen) the technology, and—most delightfully—the dozens of brightly-colored VW beetles speak to the times, the narrative dips into a dreamlike sort of reality. The severed leg, the two-faced cat (a reference to the Roman god Janus?), and echoes of carnival resonate deeply within the viewers’ experience.

While most films present narratives that require the viewer to be separated from the action, situated outside looking in as a spectator, The Secret Agent not only draws us into its reality but simultaneously translates the narrative into a sort of dream vernacular—a language of the unconscious. Doing so creates an effect of psychological dread and a sense of the inevitable, transforming the reality into the sublime. For example, when Armando/Marcelo has a nightmare later in the film, it is the images of the body, his wife, and the shark which plague him—images shared with the audience, turning the personal into narrative discourse. 

Filho structures the events in the narrative not as the dominant part of the narrative but almost as a subtext. The audience is presented the milieu of the time and the vibe of the place as an integral part of Armando’s plight as a political target. These two facets—among many others—are inextricably interwoven, part of the gestalt of the film.

The Secret Agent is by no means a linear narrative. Instead, it is a story that—like the Roman god Janus—simultaneously looks forward and back, into the past and the future. Flavia studies Brazil’s past, including Armando the dissident. Armando himself seeks information about his mother in the identification center where he works. The political dissidents, by their very nature, are looking to the future. The metaphors of the leg and the shark embody dreamlike—nightmarish—logic, as does the cat. Hans’ extensively scarred leg echoes the visual of the severed leg. 

The Secret Agent is a dense tapestry of history, politics, culture, and the personal rolled up in the vibrant colors of carnival. It is a fever dream that envelops a reality that is determined as much by its past as its present or future. The brutality of the authoritarian regime of the 1970s and the corruption of its ruling class resonate through the years, affecting Fernando—whose own memory has failed him—and Flavia. 

This is a film that resonates so deeply and rings so true that it should be seen twice. The intersecting spheres of history, politics, culture, and the personal cannot be—and probably should not be—parsed. Seeing this movie is like being dropped into another person’s dream, a reality which is highly personal but, like the work of Armando and the other dissidents, intensely social.