The Secret Agent missed out on a Best Picture Oscar nomination last week, though it still has a chance to win the Best International Feature award and provide a repeat win for Brazil. Nevertheless, it made Oscar history, with Wagner Moura becoming the first man from his country to be nominated for Best Actor. Now the movie opens this weekend at Cinépolis Euless and AMC Grapevine Mills, and if you’re watching it to keep tabs on the Oscar races, I dare say you’ll find his work as impressive as any of his fellow nominees’.
Like other films by Kleber Mendonça Filho, this is set in the filmmaker’s native Pernambuco state, though this 160-minute epic finds him in no hurry to get through its thriller plot. Moura portrays a chemistry professor whose name is either Armando or Marcelo — it’s never clear which name is his real one and which is an alias. In 1977, his studies of the Brazilian power grid piss off an electrical power magnate (Luciano Chirolli) with cronies in Brazil’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The oligarch cites his own Italian heritage as the reason why he’s going to have Armando / Marcelo murdered.
The life of this film isn’t in the chase, as the government thugs sent to kill Armando / Marcelo prove to be pretty bad at their jobs. Rather, it’s in the people that our man meets while he’s lying low in his hometown of Recife, like the grandmotherly anarcho-communist (Tânia Maria) who shelters him for a while and his father-in-law (Carlos Francisco) who owns a movie theater and shows Jaws to his young grandson (Enzo Nunes) even though Armando / Marcelo doesn’t want the boy watching scary movies. The late Udo Kier turns up as a German Jew who survived the Holocaust and who, mortifyingly, is mistaken for a fugitive Nazi by a crooked police chief (Robério Diógenes). Even worse, the police chief thinks that knowing a Nazi is the coolest thing in the world.
Then there’s a subplot that may strike you as off-puttingly weird if you’re not familiar with the magical realism of South American fiction. The police chief’s useless sons (Igor de Araújo and Italo Martins) dispose of a severed human leg in the ocean, only for the leg to take on a life of its own, wade ashore, attack gay men who are cruising for sex in Recife’s city parks, and finally turn up in the stomach of a tiger shark caught by some fishermen. The media-driven sensation created by this is a neat metaphor for the distractions that dictatorships create to draw attention away from the atrocities that they commit.
Just as in his previous film Bacurau, Mendonça Filho is savvy enough to cut all this atmosphere and detail with action sequences for us foreigners. Thus, the movie climaxes with a thoroughly botched hit that results in a shootout in a public square between the police chief’s sons and the government hit men. A lot of people die who are not Marcelo / Armando. It’s a testament to the director’s skill that this doesn’t jar with the lowbrow chill of the movie that has come before it.
Also holding it together is Moura’s performance. The native of Bahia is familiar to English-speaking audiences from movies like Elysium and Civil War, and from TV’s Narcos, where he portrayed Pablo Escobar. Here he manages to be smooth but not too smooth as Armando / Marcelo gives his pursuers the slip but also is haunted by a deep desire to get back to his son. He also portrays a grown-up version of the boy in an epilogue set during the present day, where he gives a perspective on coming of age without his dad. If The Secret Agent isn’t as strong as One Battle After Another as a story about surviving a fascist regime, it’s still a bold, likable, and carefully considered piece of work from one of Brazil’s best filmmakers, with a moving and low-key portrait of an everyday hero at its center.
The Secret Agent
Starring Wagner Moura. Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Rated R.
