Just Go With It
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s occasionally batshit political thrill mash-up is indescribable in the best way.
the Secret Agent
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho • Writer: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring: Wagner Moura, Tânia Maria, Carlos Francisco, Robério Diógenes, Kaiony Venâncio, Udo Kier
Brazil • 2hrs 40mins
Opens Hong Kong March 26 • IIB
Grade: A
I think we all knew Sentimental Value was going to win in the Oscar category that The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) was also competing in. Don’t get me wrong: Sentimental Value is a great film – mature, smart, emotionally authentic – but The Secret Agent is better. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho is as wacky, ambitious and vaguely fever-dreamish as Joachim Trier is clear and linear in him aims. And it’s that wacky feverishness that makes The Secret Agent more mesmerising and its subject matter as timely as ever. It also has a morbidly hilarious and pointed story-within-the-story about Hairy Leg, the rogue limb (literally) of some dead guy, flying around at night, kicking random gay men in the face. An actual flying kick in the face. I’d pay to watch that movie.
Mendonça Filho’s time-hopping political thriller is the brightest, shiniest political thriller to hit screens in recent memory, possibly ever, revelling in hirsute, sweaty, vivid late-’70s vibes, the years of disco and South American dictatorships propped up by Washington DC. It begins as one-time energy researcher Armando Solimões (Civil War’s Wagner Moura, who’s cool under normal circumstances and here is even more fabulous) is heading back to his hometown of Recife in his VW Bug during Carnaval in 1977, a time of “great mischief” as the titles tell us. He moves into Dona Sebastiana’s (stealth scene stealer, semi-pro Tânia Maria) boarding house of political dissidents and enemies of Brasilia. He’s back in town to collect his son, living with his cinema projectionist father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), and maybe dig up some information on his barely remembered mother. Luckily, his network of dissidents gets him a gig in the government office that issues ID cards, and as Marcelo Alves he can look into her.
Strength in numbers
Those are the very basics of a rambling drama about identity, power and reckoning with history that covers similar territory to what Walter Salles did in last year’s Oscar winner I’m Still Here. But The Secret Agent is one of those films that goes there, always unafraid to be weird, sexy, inflammatory, slick, scuzzy, difficult, demanding and, in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro and his ilk and history repeating itself, pissed. Where Salles was introspective and reflective, Mendonça Filho is loud and cautionary – and as a former film critic it’s super-cinematic; the film is so textured and tactile you can almost smell it emananting from Evgenia Alexandrova’s lush widescreen cinematography. In many ways it’s the natural evolution from Mendonça Filho’s last film, the Brazilian futuro-western Bacurau, and the ’70s influences are everywhere, from the languid tone of the period’s paranoid thrillers to its neo-sensuality and the simmering danger and bursts of violence around every corner. Rarely is an old guy going to the post office this tense. Or getting a tank of gas.
Upon arriving in Recife Armando finds out he’s incurred the wrath from an old nemesis, Eletrobras boss Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) thanks to his research and his resistance to allowing the public university he works at to bend the knee to big business (oh, if only). That gets a couple of assassins from São Paulo, Augosto (Roney Villela) and his apprentice Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), on his tail, as well as the working-class, obviously ethnic minority Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio). In the meantime, rotten cop Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his so-called “sons” Arlindo (Ítalo Martins) and Sergio (Igor de Araújo) run their little corner of the city with zero fucks about accountability; they’re the ones who unleash Hairy Leg. If you can believe it, there’s still much, much more to the story than that. Moura has a third role as Armando’s son.
The Secret Agent is a film that you let yourself sink into rather than just watch, thanks to Mendonça Filho’s frequent detours and side quests, most just for shits and giggles, but all revealing of something about the people at the centre of the story and Brazil at the time. For as amusing as Hairy Leg is, the idea is supposedly lifted from real newspaper stories that ran back in the day that used the farcical murder spree as a way to comment on corruption, homophobia, misogyny, racism (Udo Kier appears in his last role as Hans the German tailor – who is not a Nazi) and curbed freedoms without naming names and avoiding sanctions. Armando is a secret agent as much as any of his roommates at Dona Sebastiana refuge are, or the reporter who warns him he’s in danger, Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), or his deceased wife, Fátima Nascimento (Alice Carvalho), who has no trouble speaking truth to power. I talk a lot in these pages about taking a big swing, and this is another one, and it’s one that works because Mendonça Filho and Moura are in perfect sync, as is the rest of the sprawling cast. And had Moura trumped Michael B Jordan for Best Actor? It would have been just as earned. Can it be indulgent? Sure, almost any film that takes its sweet time to make its point can be. But when a filmmaker is this sure of how to get there it’s hard not to just go along for the ride.