3.5

Summary

A fragmented but haunting portrait of Brazil’s paranoid past, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film lingers more in atmosphere than resolution.

Speaking to the audience at the Sydney Film Festival, the first public screening of THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto) since it won multiple awards at Cannes, director Kleber Mendonça Filho described the Brazilian government as having effectively given itself amnesty for the abuses committed during two decades of military dictatorship. He noted that the film isn’t strictly about that, but rather a “reconstruction of an atmosphere.”

With its sweaty, smoky period detail, Mendonça certainly achieves that. Set in Recife, Pernambuco during Carnival in 1977, we’re introduced to technology academic Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who has earned the ire of a corrupt businessman and now finds himself the target of a pair of hitmen. As he reconnects with his estranged son Fernando, he begins searching government archives for clues about his mother’s past.

None of this is immediately clear. Mendonça immerses us so completely in his setting that we often feel like unseen observers to a series of loosely connected vignettes. After opening with a scene so bleak it borders on dark comedy—a body left under a piece of cardboard at a gas station, waiting days for the police to show up—the film is punctuated with moments of violence and quiet surveillance.

When an unexpected shift takes us into the modern day, two women are seen sifting through digital recordings of conversations Marcelo had under assumed names. If the film sometimes feels disjointed, it’s because someone is trying to reassemble it all later.

Departing from its gritty realism are surreal interludes featuring a CGI hairy leg hopping through Recife’s downtown, violently kicking pedestrians. Based on a real urban legend that appeared in the local papers of the day, it was a coded way for journalists to report on police violence against minorities with slightly less fear of retribution.

THE SECRET AGENT isn’t lacking in perspective or historical weight, but its length, glacial pacing and fragmented narrative may keep audiences at arm’s length. Curiously, it shares this distance with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, which also explores a similar period in Brazil’s past. The coda, which follows a violent pursuit, avoids any tidy on-screen resolution in favour of more impressionistic fragments of memory.