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When Marcelo (Wagner Moura) first arrives in Dona Sebastiana’s building, he is greeted by a curious cat whose head is split into two fully formed faces, each facing an opposite direction. In a way, Brazil is much like that cat, constantly looking at two realities at once: the past that has shaped it and the future it resiliently stumbles towards.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent first finds Moura’s character arriving back in his homeland of Recife after a stretch in São Paulo. Driving a bright yellow VW Beetle, the man’s first glimpse of his home state is an ominous one: a body stretched in front of a petrol station, blood and oil seeping into the arid grounds of the northeast. It is a sign of what is to come, a gnarly omen in gnarly times, when violence is not only common but sanctioned. It is 1977, and Brazil has just crossed the halfway mark of a dictatorship that is to last another eight years but comes to define much of the country’s identity for the following decades.
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The Secret Agent arrives two years after Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, a film about the movie palaces of his beloved Recife. That project would take seven years, some of them shared with the writing of his latest. This intersection is felt as the two works seep into one another, co-existing in a land of memory where one is made time machine, the other a paracosm.
Alexandre, the projectionist of Recife’s Cinema São Luiz and a prominent figure in Pictures of Ghosts, returns here as part fiction, part truth. Played by Carlos Francisco with the same lopsided limp and open terracotta shirt, the fictional Alexandre is Marcelo’s father-in-law and, most importantly, grandfather to his young boy, Fernando. The man is the gateway to bringing Mendonça Filho’s beloved cinema to the thriller, a movie palace whose labyrinthine corridors and small hidden rooms prove the perfect location for Marcelo’s secret testimonies.
The reason for those testimonies, given by the elusive man to the even more elusive Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), is at the heart of this political thriller that drinks from the fountain of the classic American genre and fiercely spits back its Brazilian counterpart. Like Bacurau, the film is shot in anamorphic Panavision, and just like Bacurau, it harnesses the specificities – and history – of the format to pay homage to the great classics Mendonça Filho perhaps once watched at the same screens Marcelo peeks at through the projection-booth window where sweat drips onto celluloid.
Filho’s cinephilia is stitched through The Secret Agent both diegetically and non-diegetically. It is present in the world of the film through Fernando’s drawings of Steven Spielberg’s nightmare-inducing poster for Jaws and the São Luiz, where Richard Donner’s The Omen sends customers running out in panic attacks and John Guillermin’s King Kong is teased on the marquee. But it is also heavily present in the film’s construction, with Evgenia Alexandrova’s stunning cinematography — marking Filho’s first fiction feature without frequent collaborator Pedro Sotero — gnawing at the wide frame of Panavision to evoke a Brian de Palma-esque tension and playing with depth to amplify a sense of foreboding.
In this, The Secret Agent is also self-referential, not only in its umbilical connection to Pictures of Ghosts, but in how Filho revisits central themes and aesthetic proddings of his previous work to construct his boisterous thriller. You have the feeling of community and camaraderie of Neighboring Sounds, with Sebastiana’s refugee commune proving a bustling microcosmos of shared loves, joys, and grief; much like Aquarius, this is a film deferential to the preciousness of belonging, of rooting oneself in a home that goes beyond the proverbial; and the riotous violence and punk of Bacurau is here once more, with the director chopping at limbs and skin and bone alike, exploding and tearing and cutting with delicious mercilessness.
The filmmaker reenlists some key repeat creative partners to realise this ambitious recreation of 1970s Recife. Production designer Thales Junqueira makes cocoons out of safe homes, lining shelves with precious souvenirs and knick-knacks, each in itself a portal to another world, another time. Bureaucratic offices become escape rooms, overstuffed and austere, the click-clacking of typewriters merging into an eerie countdown. Costume designer Rita Azevedo fashions Moura after the Brazilian flag, with yellow graphic tees, blue polos, and green shirts composing a wardrobe that feels more confrontational than patriotic.
But The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and feasibly Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of the kind of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching longing of a future condemned to remain possibility. The large ensemble cast, plural and charming and ever-interesting to look at and listen to, crowns a film that grabs at the fabric of a people with the confident, hungry hands of those who love it.
