Review: "The Secret Agent"

Buoyed by a nuanced and captivating performance from Brazilian star Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent is a mystery that twists and simmers its way to its only possible, reality-based, heartrending closure. The film took home top awards from last May’s Cannes Film Festival and has rightfully landed on year-end “best of” lists. Now it’s a major season awards contender, making the shortlist for the International Oscar and landing three top Golden Globe nominations (for drama, foreign language and – a first for a Brazilian man – dramatic actor).

The story centers on Armando, a widowed former university professor turned political refugee using the pseudonym Marcelo as he hides out in 1977 Brazil. When a pair of hitmen are hired to take Armando out, he’s told to flee the country, but he won’t go without his young son, Fernando. He tells his story on a recorded audiotape (with some explanatory scenes fleshed out in flashback). Decades later, the tape is reviewed by a young university researcher who saves a copy and takes it to Armando’s son, now grown (also played by Moura).

Even as details of Armando’s story are only slowly revealed, which could cause confusion for some viewers (or even turn some off from the purposefully meandering, nearly three-hour movie), Moura’s blend of sensitivity and strength – and the production team’s spellbinding capture of period details – infuse the mystery with a deeper significance that holds the viewer’s attention.

In ways, Armando stands in for an entire nation facing a brutal, 21-year military dictatorship – and still living life in the meanwhile (as in a scene where the hitmen pursue their target through the busy streets of Carnival celebrations). He’s on the run, fearful for his life, still hopeful for his future, impossibly brave in the face of imminent threats – and ultimately doomed.

In ways, he’s also the male counterpart to Fernanda Torres’ role last year as Eunice Paiva, a woman investigating the forced disappearance of her politician husband, based on real historical figures, in Walter Salles’ 1970s-set I’m Still Here. (It’s surely not lost on the Agent team that Torres became the first Brazilian actress to win an acting Golden Globe last year, and the film took home the International Oscar).

Perhaps it’s telling that Agent is the second Brazilian film in as many years to tackle this ugly historical record. Could the current political climate be inspiring a cautionary revival of historical memory?

While different, both films rely on simmering central performances, minute period details and a subtle rendering of the fear people lived with under the brutal regime. The violence is palpable in both films, but in Agent, it’s made more explicit in some very bloody scenes. And the regime, or the threat Armando faces, is likened to a predator shark via a substory involving a human leg found in the belly of a tiger shark and later imagined in an absurdly comical way to be terrorizing the city.

The national obsession with the story of the shark and the leg is paralleled in the film’s storyline by the 1977 release of the film Jaws. This is just one of writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s nods to the cultural role of cinema of that era, and just one of the elements of the film’s masterful period production detail, also including the music, a saturated color palette and the use of widescreen and split screen. The still used as the poster in the US, showing Moura in period wardrobe framed by a large mustard-colored oval phone booth with a red pay phone, perfectly captures that studied 70s look.

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Review originally published by AWFJ.org

Images courtesy of Neon