‘I am not a violent person but this man….I’d kill him with a hammer’
After premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last May, director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s newest film, The Secret Agent, is now nominated at Sunday’s BAFTAs, is in the running for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, among other nominations including Best International Film (representing Brazil) and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, its star.
Set in late-70s Brazil amidst the country’s military dictatorship, the film follows Marcelo, a lone traveller on his way home to the city of Recife in the hopes of reconnecting with his young son, Fernando, and finding safe passage out of the country for both of them.
A quarrel at a rural petrol station sets the tone of the film’s political commentary, with two policemen descending on Marcelo’s yellow VW Beetle to press him for his papers while a body lies unacknowledged in the sand beside them, left out for days.
The bureaucracy of the regime only becomes more apparent from that opening gambit, with Marcelo’s return to Recife offering precious little respite. Living among refugees in a crowded townhouse and working under a secret identity, hesoon finds himself the quarry of a pair of hitmen, whose lives we are also offered insight into.
Despite getting to spend some time following their pursuit of Marcelo, the details of their motive (or rather, their client’s) remain a mystery for us as the audience to uncover over the course of the film’s hefty runtime, though the titular Agent himself may have some secrets of his own.
The premise sounds fairly conventional for a thriller, but it’s interesting that the film has been billed as such because, to my mind, slapping the thriller moniker on its poster or in a review like this one risks misselling it, to an extent. There are certainly thrilling moments in which the themes at play here come to a head in action beats that find our protagonist running for his life through the bustling streets of Carnival, but they are few and far between.
Instead, the film is surprisingly concerned with offering a slice of life drama revolving around the difficulties of feeling unwelcome, othered and endangered in a city that ought to be considered your home. Marcelo’s temporary accommodation works as a mixing pot of cultures, with his fellow ‘agents’ hailing from all sorts of places. The reality of their lives and the bonds formed between them are often brought to the forefront of the narrative, with scenes giving fascinatingly candid moments of genuine connection paced in such a way that they feel as though they could very well be real conversations from the era (or ours, given the state of things, particularly across the pond).
It’s remarkably slow in its telling, yet I was consistently impressed by how little that came to matter to me. The film felt long but rather than coming off as overly-indulgent, there was just a naturalistic air to each scene that I was happy to lend an ear to (or an eye – the film is delivered entirely in Brazilian Portuguese with subtitles). That choice of pacing won’t be to everyone’s liking, but I would be hard pressed to find scenes that felt disposable or without purpose in the greater narrative of the film.
The film’s best quality is perhaps the way in which this slow burn drama manages to bring the setting of Recife to life. When I first saw the city, I didn’t think much of it, but its potential as a bustling super-hub became apparent over time.
Whether it’s the seemingly mundane office workplace in which Marcelo hides in plain sight or the hazy, crowded cinema overseen by his supportive father-in-law, in which audiences sit stunned by the first Omen movie (not to be confused with 2024’s The First Omen, which is admittedly tricky) and the projectionists stand high above, wiping their brows in the sweltering heat, Mendoça Filho lends enough detail to each scene to well and truly seat us in the film’s 70s world, which helps us to stay engaged with everything happening within it.
While I felt by the film’s third act that I had properly visited Recife alongside Marcelo, it was clear to me that he needed to get his affairs in order and leave before things took a turn, which only added to my enjoyment of the final half-hour, in which each strand we’ve been following along comes together in a satisfying conclusion, with some mild caveats.
The film ends with an epilogue, revisiting a recurring subplot that, until that point, had felt, to me, like the least important part of the narrative – more of a framing device for the greater story at hand. In coming back to this device one last time in the final moments of the film, I was able to appreciate why such a strand had been included and developed throughout the film – it’s one of a few examples of non-chronological storytelling at play here, as we dip into Marcelo’s past to uncover more about his present.
In looking back at the movie as a whole, it becomes that Mendoça Filho is especially interested in dissecting ideas of generational memory, heritage and the way in which cinema and especially cinema-going can define our outlook on a time in our lives, be that on a personal or a societal level.
The mysterious arrival of a shark with a human leg in its belly sparks all kinds of rumours throughout the city, fuelled by the public’s still-recent Jaws-related trauma (Jawma being the official term), resulting in some of the film’s madder moments. It links into the ongoing critique of the regime (though I won’t say how) and everyone involved is clearly keyed into the ideas at play here – there are great cine-literate references and gags that had me laughing out loud – but I felt that in focusing more on this idea at the very of the film, a moment that should otherwise have been more impactful felt brushed over and underplayed. I could see the vision behind this choice of ending, but I would have liked to focus more on the central drama.
I knew nothing about the film going into the preview screening, but in the days since watching it, I’ve been really surprised by how much it stuck with me, and how vividly I’m able to recall Moura’s performance and the tangible authenticity of Recife as a setting.
The slower pace and long runtime (2 hours and 40 minutes) are a hard sell on paper, but it didn’t take long for me to settle into the story here and just enjoy the ride. At a time where it seems easier and easier to watch something at the cinema, walk out and forget it immediately, it’s good to have something that sticks with you in your memory, not least because memory and recollection as concepts in their own right play such a large role in the narrative.
Though the ending didn’t quite hit the right note for me, the film as a whole is a nuanced, well-performed Best Picture contender and I’m looking forward to walking its sunbaked streets again sometime soon.
The Secret Agent is in cinemas now.
