Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest movie, The Secret Agent, is one that often feels like it’s going undercover even in its own narrative.
Which sounds confusing, and I suppose it sort of it, but let me just say this: if you take nothing else from this review, know that I loved this movie, and that there’s so much I want to say about it I hardly know where to begin, but that I thoroughly recommend putting aside an afternoon to get into the iconic Brazilian writer-director’s excursion into historical noir. But if you’d like to take something else from this article, let’s get into The Secret Agent and it’s brilliantly bizarre approach to narrative structure.
The Secret Agent follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a one-time professor who has taken on a new identity in the hopes of fleeing the Brazilian military dictatorship with his son after the death of his wife; arriving in the city of Recife, he must navigate the festival of Carnival while reconnecting with his in-laws and hiding out in a refuge for those under similar persecution.
When it comes to just the bare bones of The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho serves up what feels like an almost effortlessly rich world that’s packed with dense detail, superb character work, and a sumptuous sense of time and place that would be more than enough to recommend it alone. Moura’s career in the last decade or so has been packed with performances that have you convinced they must be his very best, but his turn here as Armando pretty much blew all of them out of the water – we know so little about the character for so long, relying only on the tiny details Moura lets slip in his performance, an extraordinary turn in a movie full of them. Long-time collaborator Tânia Maria, as Dona Sebastiana, brings grit and wit through a haze of cigarette smoke, and Gabriel Leone is an all-timer villain as Bobbi, one of the assassins sent to take out Armando, to name but a few, but it’s truly a matter of taking your pick because this ensemble is just so damn strong. Tension bubbles to the surface in scorching sequences that seem to come out of nowhere, the overlapping narratives crashing into each other to impressive effect, from the short story that serves as the film’s opening to the bittersweet and unexpected epilogue that sees Moura take on an entirely different role to close out the story.
What I found most interesting about this movie, though, was the way the story was structured. Mendonça Filho really puts the secret in secret agent in the structure of this movie, which, at first, plays out like as a borderline-inscrutable missive that leaves the audience as much out of the truth as most of the characters – who Armando really is, what he’s doing here, why he’s on the run at all, none of it is made clear to us, and deliberately so. Our way into this story (though it’s not revealed for a good chunk of the movie’s runtime) is through modern-day history student Flavia (Laura Lufési), who is transcribing and researching Armando’s experiences in Recife; the version of the narrative we get is one reliant on her transcriptions and access to historical data, and we unravel the story alongside her. It’s a bold choice, to ask for this amount of patience before the pieces start to fit together, one that could easily turn alienating to audiences as it holds back so much context about Armando and his life story.
But it’s an approach that works really well within the world Mendonça Filho creates to serve as a backdrop for The Secret Agent – it’s one studded with storytelling, with Flavia’s overarching investigation re-imagining folk stories and sensationalist newspaper headlines as B-movie horror, and a cinema serving as the central location for so much of the movie’s simmering tension that allows for a constant parade of posters, references, and clips from classic cinema. Mendonça Filho’s narrative structure and presentation explore the stories that survive and those that don’t, with a supreme confidence that lends The Secret Agent an utterly unique feel that’s as playful as it is precise.
The Secret Agent is, as so many of Mendonça Filho’s films have been, a completely singular piece – one that demands patience, but that pays off in style by the time the credits roll. I would love to hear what you made of it, so let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Indiewire)
No But Listen 