The Secret Agent
O Agente Secreto

Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho follows up his wild and weird 2019 western Bacurau, a collaboration with Juliano Dornelles, with this more straightforward historical political thriller. The Secret Agent is a long and winding narrative set in 1977, during the political turmoil of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Wagner Moura stars as Armando, a former school teacher and technology specialist fleeing a mysterious past. He returns to the city of Recife, where he's set up with a job and a place to live by a resistance movement led by a woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido). The job is at the city's social registration archive, where Armando searches for any record of his mother. The house is run by a colorful character named Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who shelters several other political refugees, and it is close to where his son, Fernando, is being raised by his grandfather. The grandfather, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), is a projectionist at Cinema São Luiz. It's a good set-up, but Armando doesn't realize the level of danger he's in.

Neither do we, for at least half of this 159-minute film, which unfolds leisurely in four parts. Each part is intriguing, and each scene is compellingly crafted, shot, and edited. The film has an expansive, novelistic structure that playfully darts back and forth between narrative threads, always keeping its protagonist at the center of every scene, even when he's not physically there. Yet as a whole, the film feels somewhat low-stakes. There's so little forward momentum in The Secret Agent that it's hard to call it a political thriller. It certainly has the look, feel, and excitingly informative qualities of other terrific '70-set period political thrillers set outside the US, like Yann Demange's '71, Olivier Assayas' Carlos, and Ben Affleck's Argo, but it's much more leisurely and casually paced. I don't think it's the film's fault that I nodded off briefly both times I watched it (fortunately, in different parts of the film), but this is not a picture that holds you in its grip every second like the three mentioned above. Of course, that's not what Filho is going for.

What we get instead is a film that conveys the everyday feelings of hiding out, lying low, and keeping your head down as you assess your next move while under government surveillance and persecution. Filho's shoots Recife, his home city, in rich, edifying ways. His previous film, Pictures of Ghosts, was a documentary about Recife and the cinemas there that he used to frequent. The specific use of the city and of the Cinema São Luiz in The Secret Agent are examples of how the movie keeps us engaged without ratcheting up tension or giving us a sense of bad guys closing in (until that starts to happen).

Moura (who won Best Actor at Cannes for this role) gives a fantastic performance, always keeping us wondering what he's thinking at each moment. The supporting cast is full of terrific actors, all of whom were new to me apart from Udo Kier in his final film role. The naturalism of the cast helps create the feeling of watching a documentary rather than a highly produced thriller. Yet, even with this quality, Filho manages to stage some impressively cinematic sequences, starting with the extended opening scene at a gas station, building to a violent assassination attempt set-piece, and culminating in a curious but compelling leap forward in time. I had assumed, after my first sleepy viewing as the fourth foreign language film I'd seen on the same day of a film festival, that upon second viewing, I would come to consider this one of the year's very best. That didn't quite turn out to be the case, but I still think this is a hell of a good film, and I look forward to a third viewing (maybe on an empty Sunday afternoon).