(IMAGE: Courtesy of Neon)
Neon. 2025. Drama. 158 minutes.
RATING: 4 out of 4
Recent releases have provided remarkable insight into political trends in contemporary Brazilian history, notably last year with Walter Salles’ Academy Award winner for Best International Feature Film I’m Still Here, followed earlier this year by Apocalypse in the Tropics, a revealing documentary on the influence of partisan evangelical Christians from Petra Costa (Oscar-nominated for 2019’s The Edge of Democracy). Now Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, a knockout political thriller of remarkable insight and sensitivity, is also in the awards hunt and could prove a formidable challenger in multiple prize categories with its alarming exploration of resistance against authoritarianism.
For a man on the run, Marcelo Alves (Dope Thief’s Wagner Moura) seems remarkably calm during the opening minutes of Mendonça Filho’s period feature, even when encountering a man’s dead body at a roadside filling station. After driving for three days enroute to the northern city of Recife, he seems to take the unusual development in stride once the attendant explains that he’s been waiting for the authorities to collect the corpse for several days, but since it’s Carnaval week, it’s still splayed unceremoniously outdoors, rotting in the tropical sun under a makeshift cardboard shroud.
Marcelo only grows concerned when the highway patrol swoops on his bright yellow VW Bug and an officer begins searching his car, asking about drugs or weapons that may be concealed inside. This being 1977, at the height of Brazil’s notorious military dictatorship, he’s prepared for the cops’ hostile response to his longish hair and heavy beard, clear indications that he could be a troublemaker, but manages to fend off their barely disguised request for a bribe by turning over the remains of his last pack of cigarettes. After reaching Recife, he’s taken in by feisty 77-year-old Sebastiana (Tania Maria), who watches over an apartment complex inhabited by a variety of political “refugees,” although it only gradually becomes clear why Marcelo is sheltering among them.
The deliberate, sometimes elliptical, pacing is one of the many rewards of Mendonça Filho’s slow-burn feature, winner of both the best director and best actor awards for Moura at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. Returning once again to the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where his films are typically set, Mendonça Filho’s fourth feature imagines his hometown of Recife as a deceptively low-key setting for exploring the impact of repression on ordinary people guilty only of defying, or even just ignoring, the period’s oppressive political climate.
Marcelo plans to reunite with his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who’s been living with his in-laws since the untimely death of his wife Fatima (Alice Carvalho) several years previous, and leave the country entirely. He’s being assisted by the mysterious Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), who’s coordinating a network of clandestine activists stretching from Brasilia to Recife and beyond that’s provided him with lodging at Sebastiana’s place, fake identity papers and strategic planning assistance to flee overseas.
Marcelo’s reasons for leaving Brazil, following many others before him who became expats during the 21-year military regime, are revealed in flashback during a conversation taped by Elza. Years earlier, when Marcelo was a scientific researcher and professor at a Recife university, he had a fateful run-in with Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a powerful and prideful industrialist with ties to the military regime, who proceeded to plant newspaper articles accusing Marcelo (whose actual name is Armando) of corruption, destroying his career entirely out of spite.
After calling him a “despicable man” and accusing Marcelo of being a Communist, tantamount to issuing a death threat under the dictatorship, Ghirotti has been pursuing a personal vendetta ever since. Putting a contract out on Marcelo, he’s hired two hit-men who track him to Recife with plans to exact revenge with the help of corrupt local police chief Euclides (Roberio Diogenes). These sequences of the assassins searching for Marcelo are as close as the film gets to conventional thriller territory and Mendonça Filho expertly channels the likes of genre masters Hitchcock and Scorsese as they pursue him through the picturesque streets of Recife, still reverberating with Carnaval celebrations.
Mendonça Filho isn’t necessarily concerned with developing a linear narrative, or even sticking to an entirely literal depiction of events. One subplot that verges on urban legend involves the discovery of a hairy, disembodied male leg inside the stomach of a shark. After chief Euclides and his officers dump the severed limb in a nearby river, perhaps concerned it could be linked to one of their extrajudicial executions, the leg quickly reanimates and comes ashore. Hopping to a nearby park popular for both gay and straight hook-ups, it then proceeds to kick the daylights out of numerous couples, who flee in terror. Newspaper stories about the assaults put the entire city on edge, amping up the sense of general chaos just as Carnaval celebrations are coming to a close.
In another, more realistic digression, the film abruptly flashes forward to the present day during the second act to reveal a project by university researchers Flavia (Laura Lufesi) and Daniela (Isadora Ruppert) to transcribe hours of tape recorded by Elza and her associates concerning their work on Marcelo’s case. The effect is initially disorienting, but it sets up Flavia’s quest to ascertain Marcelo’s fate, as she determines to discover the outcome of his Recife visit in a final sequence that forms the film’s poignant conclusion.
Shooting digitally in stunning widescreen Panavision format, Mendonça Filho artfully captures the burnished tropical hues of the southern hemisphere summer, while editors Eduardo Serrano and Matheus Farias’ fluid style helps maintain continuity over differing time periods and heightens suspense during the film’s climactic action sequences.
While it’s never entirely clear who the “secret agent” of the film’s title might be, in a way, all of the characters involved in the clandestine movement to protect activists and victims of the regime are indeed covert agents. What The Secret Agent clearly does reveal is that Kleber Mendonça Filho is no longer just a respected arthouse auteur, but an internationally recognized filmmaker of the highest caliber who continues to advance the boundaries of contemporary world cinema.
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