The Secret Agent Review

Going against the ideologies of authoritative regimes, dictatorships and fascistic rulers and living under a disguise which yet again opens up a door from the darkest chapters of their life that lurks back to haunt them in the present seems to be a common theme running down through the veins of majority of the films that are competing in the awards circle this year. And Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Secret agent ticks all these boxes but rather does not promise what it’s title boasts. What your eyes unravel aren’t a high staked espionage thriller but the entire narrative runs through a dramatic and dense perspective that equally makes this film one of the best of this year. This film doesn’t ruthlessly throw all of it’s exposition on the face of the viewers, but rather establishes the setting at a dilatory pacing. The story takes place in the year 1977 in brazil, where the entire country is going through a military dictatorship.

And Wagner Moura stars as Marcelo, a man who although showcases a kind and melancholic nature carries a lot of history behind him. The Opening scene is one of the best ways in which the film introduces one of it’s core themes corruption and the lack of value given to human beings in an unjust society in a typical Show Don’t tell Fashion, that instills deeply into our minds in a similar fashion as to how Marcelo will have a nightmare of this incident later on in the film. He arrives at a gas station and finds a dead body lying there which starts to rot and apparently nobody cares about. The attendant there tells that the man was shot to dead while he was trying to steal motor oil in the night. And just as he starts to explain the protagonist about the back story, their conversation gets disrupted with the arrival of two cops. The Attendant finally sighs thinking that they might be there for the dead body, but nope. They are rather too much focused on trying to collect a bribe by thoroughly checking for any violation in Marcello’s Volkswagen beetle. And after he doesn’t find any, he proceeds to ask him for a bribe to which he offers him his pack of cigarettes.

And the remainder of the film also builds on in a similar crescendo, evoking strong imagery and surrealism to flesh out this nightmarish tale of survival in secret identities. When Marcelo arrives in Refice, he takes refuge in the home of a woman called Dona Sebastina (played by Tania Maria) who also resonates similar ideologies to that of Marcello’s. The Portrayal of other characters are also equally written in an intriguing setting and establishes that many neighbor’s of Sebastina whom the protagonist gets to meet, also prefer to use their pseudonyms and carefully articulate to speak their words which expresses about their sense of fear and paranoia that somebody from the government might be listening to their conversations. Among them are a single mother named Claudia who develops a crush on him from the tales that Sebastina was telling her about, and a pair of husband and wife duo Thereza and Antonio who seeked refuge in Sebastina’s house escaping from the Angolan Civil War.

There are also many other themes juggling around in this film which hits in a harder way such as the absence of parents in the upbringing of a child. Marcelo is placed to work at the city’s official identity card office under which one of his main obsessions is to find out the record and identity of his long lost mother. Meanwhile in his personal life too, he is a Widower and always thinks about his own son Fernando who is being raised by his father in law and Marcello gets to meet him very rarely. There is also a touching scene in which his son asks the father about the return of his mother to which he replies about the reality. But what made Marcello suffer all of these difficulties is where the film reveals the back story of this mysterious man. His original name is Armando and he worked as a professor in a university where his academic freedom was suppressed by a wealthy and corrupt industrialist named Henrique Ghirotti which lead to a conflict between both of them. Armando confesses about this account when he is cautioned by a resistance leader Elza (played by Maria Fernanda Candido) that Ghirotti has actually hired two contract killers Bobbi (played by Gabriel leone) and Augusto (played by Roney Villela) to kill Armando. In this account it is also told that Armando’s wife Fatima was actually killed by Ghirotti over an argument that takes place at a restaurant where Ghirotti insults the protagonist and his wife. Aside from such small instances, the movie doesn’t clearly explain or establish the conflict and motifs well which could’ve been a lot better and dense giving the film’s huge runtime. But instead it felt a bit vague and was not impactful in conveying this Vendetta.

The interesting part of the film mostly is hands down it’s third act, where all the introduced characters start to meet in an exciting yet violent revelation. The corrupt chief of police Euclide (played by Roberto Diogenes) was an interesting role to see on screen but felt like he could’ve been used to a further extent in the narrative. It created a lot of suspense and dialed up the tenseness levels to a thousand when Augusto meets Euclide. Rather than ending on a messy note, the mix-up of these characters were also stupendously flawless and gripping. Another even interesting concept is forgetfulness and nostalgia. At a point in the film, it jarringly cuts to a scene set in the present, where a student named Flavia is listening to the conversations of Armando, which actually turns the whole point of the film that she’s unraveling Armando’s story, which was very unique. But the ending rather ends in a very abrupt form, where-in she gets to know that even after Armando was grappling for his life, he was killed and framed as a corrupt professor. That blunt ending after almost spending close to three hours in this world made it short. But that’s how the film conveys it’s message through his now grown up son Fernando (also played by Wagner Moura) who tells Flavia about how vaguely does he remember about his father. Remembrance as his father also tells him through a dialogue in the opening section of the film, where he replies that the dead persons always return when we think about them through memories.

Another hands down the most interesting sub-plot of the film is the one involving about a human leg found inside the body of a shark. There is a surrealist scene later on in the film where-in this same leg chases around random men who are cruising at a public park. Later it is found out that it’s a newspaper article that symbolically describes the politically corrupt activities during the carnival week. It’s so Surreal yet absurd in nature that it beautifully compares the rule with the Shark’s characteristics.

Keeping aside such a few unanswered questions, The Secret Agent is a very well made original film that is so thought provoking . It has generated a lot of excitement when it was originally premiered at the Cannes film festival where it even went on to win Best Director for Mendonça Filho and Best actor for Moura along with lauded with an FIPRESCI prize. This film also boasts the golden globe and BAFTA for best international feature film, which makes it a one of the strong contender to even win an Oscar.