Photo © NEON
Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent (2025)
Marcelo, a lanky, melancholy man, is headed for the coastal town of Recife. It’s Brazil, 1977, the country shouldering a dictatorship whose weight is felt in ways large and small. Marcelo (Wagner Moura) casts the worried look of a man on the run as he pulls into an Esso station with his yellow VW Beetle. He notices a corpse covered in cardboard and flies. Death and decay are everywhere, but it’s Carnival, and the people of Recife aren’t going to let murder, whether by the government or ordinary criminals, stop the party.
Marcelo is the hunted protagonist of The Secret Agent, the latest from Brazilian film critic-turned-auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho. Like his previous films, especially Aquarius and Bacurau, the plot concerns insidious forces that invade everyday life and the forms resistance can take. In the Brazil of The Secret Agent, governed by a frowning dictator, dancing and laughter can be one way of saying “No!” But it’s not enough.
Marcello’s drive to Recife is delayed by the arrival of the highway patrol with lights flashing. One of the cops has blood on his khaki uniform, the first of many small, telling details Mendonça Filho accumulates during The Secret Agent. They make Marcello step out of his car; they search it thoroughly, asking about drugs, guns—and his papers. Then they ask for a donation to the “Police Carnival Fund.” Marcello has nothing to offer them but a half-empty pack of cigarettes. They take it.
Marcello’s destination in Recife is an apartment building whose landlady, Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), is a birdlike, chain-smoking 77-year-old. She’s the movie’s Thelma Ritter, the bossy but kindhearted den mother for an assortment of fugitives, a teenage runaway and an Angolan refugee couple as well as people opposed to Brazil’s authoritarian regime. Even the housecat is a stray, saved by Dona Sebastiana from being putdown. The residents form a community amidst the dangerous chaos.
Marcello (turns out that’s not his real name) is in trouble but he doesn’t realize how much until Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), the leader of a well-connected dissident network, tells him that Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a smugly unctuous corporate CEO, has a price on his head. A pair of hitmen have come for him in Recife, and earlier scenes show that the cold-blooded father-stepson team have killed before.
The Secret Agent pivots between times and places, including the abrupt emergence of a 2025 history student, Flavia (Laura Lufési), trying to piece together the story of Elza’s resistance and Marcello’s role. Marcello had been a professor at a public university (in flashbacks he looks like Che Guevara) who resisted Ghirotti’s plans to privatize his lithium battery research; is this why his wife is dead and other colleagues have disappeared? Marcello’s objective is to reunite with Fernando, his 10-year-old boy, cared for by his late wife’s cinema-owning parents. They will have to leave the country on a false passport provided by Elza, but late in the movie, the clock starts ticking. Will Marcello and Fernando make it out before the hitmen find them?
Mendonça Filho draws inspiration from ‘70s political thrillers, even handing his Russian French cinematographer, Evgenia Alexandrova, the keys to a set of ‘70s-vintage cameras and lenses to replicate the feel of those pictures. However, The Secret Agent’s running motif has less to do with Alan Pakula or Michelangelo Antonioni than Steven Spielberg. Specifically, Jaws. When a severed human leg turns up inside the belly of a shark, Recife’s affably corrupt police chief, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), intervenes. Later, using stop-motion photography, Mendonça Filho sends a disembodied leg careening around a park at night, attacking smooching parkgoers with sharp, comical kicks. The story is a media sensation (perhaps it’s a comment on a sensationalized media that misses the big picture?).
Marcello’s son is obsessed with Jaws; he copies the lobby poster in crayon and is dying to see the movie. His grandfather, the theater owner, won’t let him, worried that the violence is too disturbing, a mordant concern in a violent society swimming with sharks in human shape.
The Secret Agent is screening at the Downer Theatre.
