Already showered with awards, “The Secret Agent,” written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, is Brazil’s submission for the upcoming Academy Awards in the category of International Feature. Those will not be its only nominations.
Like so many movies this year, “The Secret Agent” has multiple parts, some meshing easily, others not so much. But unlike most of those other features trying to tell a story in segments or different story arcs, this film is greater than the sum of those parts.
Marcelo, a roughly handsome man of no particular means, is driving home to Recife in his bright yellow VW bug. It’s carnival week so everything is a bit hectic. The landscape is bleak and he’s out of gas. Stopping at a deserted gas station on the road, it’s the dead body covered with a cardboard leaf that he notices first; the overwhelming smell, a close second. About to leave, the attendant comes running out. What with the dead body there haven’t been many customers and he can’t afford to lose even one. The police are occupied with Carnival and the dead body is a mere inconvenience. As he fills up Marcelo’s car, he’s almost joyful at the sound of police sirens. Finally they’ve come about the body; except they haven’t. They’ve been tracking Marcelo’s car and are there for a shakedown. It’s 1977 in Brazil; the economy is terrible and the police take what they can get, where they can get it. The clear-eyed Marcelo recognizes the symptoms and remains calm. He has nothing but a half empty pack of cigarettes to give because his last cruzeiro went into his gas tank. With a shrug of the shoulders and nary a glance at the dead body, the cops leave with their meager reward and Marcelo is on his not particularly merry way.
The scene is set. Chaos reigns, justice is in short supply and problems are ignored or “taken care of” in the Biblical sense. The country is still under military rule but the structural safeguards, such that they were or were not, are crumbling.
Marcelo hasn’t been home in some time and he’s eager to reconnect with his son Fernando. His wife died a few years before and he left Recife under trying circumstances. Marcelo, known as Armando in that earlier life, is on the run. Traveling incognito under an assumed name, he is the secret agent in his own life, trying to skirt an unknown danger and come out alive. The danger he’s in is palpable even if somewhat amorphous. Given shelter by Dona Sebastiana, a woman with her own secrets, Marcelo is surrounded by others, like himself who have run afoul of someone, something, known or unknown, awaiting transfer to a better life. That better life for himself and Fernando may come in the form of new identities arranged by the mysterious Elza, part of a secret resistance movement. All he needs to do is wait and attract no attention.
But there lies the rub because Marcelo is being tracked. Years ago in an earlier life, when he was Armando, he was the head of an engineering unit at the local university. He ran afoul of Ghirotti, an important and very rich entrepreneur with government connections. Like most of the country’s power structure, Ghirotti is dismissive of anything produced in the north. He has come to deliver a message. Armando’s unit is being shut down and all the work is being transferred to Rio and taken over by labs there. He dismissively explains that nothing good or of substance comes from the north. Armando, protective of his department, one that has attracted international attention, objects strenuously. They do excellent work, better than in any lab in Rio. Armando recognizes immediately that this was a politically corrupt decision allowing control to go into private rather than public hands. He knows that one of the motivators for this decision is a patent he holds that Ghirotti wants, one that is fundamental for his business. Armando makes it clear that he will never relinquish it. After closing the department, Ghirotti attempted to smear Armado’s reputation, to little avail. Furious at the scientist’s lack of respect and refusal to acquiesce, feelings that have been festering for several years, the industrialist hires two hitmen to take care of “the problem.” It is the ticking clock of mortality that Armando faces.
Mendonça Filho cleverly juxtaposes 1977 Brazil with the present day, using the soft frame of two women tasked with transcribing tapes, clandestinely recorded, of Armando and Elza as he nervously anticipates whatever awaits him. Although unimportant to the events of the past, they make a relatively smooth segue into the connection to the present.
The story of Marcelo/Armando heads straight into a collision of right and wrong, good and evil, rich and poor. It is the portrait of daily life in Brazil that frames this narrative. After so many years of repression, the people had become inured to the corruption of the politicians, the ability of the wealthy to freely drain the country’s resources, the incompetence of local police, the tortures exerted by the national police and the incredible cheapness of everyday life. From the first shot of a dead man under a cardboard “sheet,” to the hiring of assassins to eliminate inconveniences, Mendonça Filho has introduced us to a concept that runs throughout the narrative: life is cheap but respect is priceless.
It is Carnival time when sambas are punctuated by gunfire; elaborate costumes disguise the poverty beneath the headdress. Newspaper stories highlight the rising death toll, one where the local police captain, Euclides, jokes that the number will, no doubt, rise to 100 before the festivities are over. The revelers are idiots. It’s death as a source of amusement. Recife, Armando’s beloved home town, is truly one of the most beautiful spots on earth whose sandy beaches run for miles and the sunsets are bright red over turquoise sea. Mendonça Filho’s Recife is dirty, dusty and dry, far from the idyllic beaches featured on brochures. But Mendonça Filho also subtly illustrates another fact of Brazilian life—the multi-colored people who straddle all strata of society. The idiotic police captain has a white son and an adopted black son, each treated equally. Race is less important or noticeable than wealth, which can cross any racial boundaries that exist. But it is honor and respect that rule even the lowest of society. It was a perceived lack of respect that was the primary motivator in Ghirotti’s desire to see Armando killed. The importance of respect is further illustrated by the man who is subcontracted by the initial assassins to carry out the murder of Armando.
There are many small, but significant story arcs used by Mendonça Filho, each touching on respect, on being seen. Armando (as Marcelo) works temporarily at the department that registers births and issues identity cards. He spends his hours going through the state archives looking for the birth certificate of his mother. The illegitimate child born of a 14-year-old maid and the 17- year-old son of the manor, Armando was raised by his paternal grandparents, never to meet his mother. It was as if she was invisible. His search, speaking reams about his character, is to prove her existence, an existence that heretofore had been erased. He needed to give her that honor, even as it endangered him. It is but a small sidebar in a larger story but is endemic to what the writer/director was trying to show about a life well lived, even under trying circumstances. Significant also is a scene where the police captain, escorting his new “friend” Marcelo, goes to the shop of the German bespoke tailor. The captain reverently refers to him as someone who fought for the Germans in World War II, failing, as ever, to notice the Menorah on the side table. Tone deaf and funny, this non-sequitor of a scene is another illustration of the concept of invisibility while also showing the complex relationship Brazil had in sheltering Jews and Nazi war criminals after the war, foremost among them Josef Mengele.
Special mention should be given to Mattheus Farias and Eduardo Serrano, the editors who seamlessly tied all the seemingly disparate parts together into the cohesive whole Mendonça Filho envisioned. Cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova showed us the grit of this Recife so well that you could feel it. It is no mean feat to make a beautiful city like Recife so mundane and ugly. Significantly, given the number of roles Mendonça Filho wrote, all, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, show remarkable character development and depth, different at the beginning than they are at the end.
It is the actors that are the greatest part of this whole. They were all terrific and evocative but too many to mention. In the small role of dogged hitman Vilmar, Kaiony Venâncio was astonishingly frightening with an immoral resolve that was terrifying, punctuated by his demand for respect. The dead eyes and tight mouth of Luciano Chirolli as Ghirotti will stay with you long after he disappears from the screen. Robério Diógenes as Euclides, the crooked, jovial inept captain of the Recife police illustrated just how impossible it would be to rely on the authorities for anything remotely approximating justice.
It is, however, Wagner Moura as Marcelo/Armando that takes this film to a different level. Quiet, determined, devoted, Moura is the everyman, the ordinary citizen thrust into extraordinary circumstances. His eyes still shine with hope while his body stiffens, knowing what lies ahead for him. For this portrayal, he has already won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, among many others. Known to American audiences for his leads in “Civil War,” “Dope Thief” and “Narcos,” he steps into a new category with this character. It is difficult to imagine anyone else in this role.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Now playing at the AMC Century City 15. Opening December 19 at the Monica Film Center.
