TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

O Agente Secreto
***½/****
starring Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Cândido
written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

By Angelo Muredda “He had a good voice,” an archivist muses to her colleague about a historical subject whose life under autocratic rule she’s been piecing together from audio cassette recordings and newspaper clippings late in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. A chronicler of the gentrified streets, gated communities, and forgotten movie theatres of his northern hometown of Recife (which he has commemorated in films past, from his 2011 debut feature Neighbouring Sounds–partially shot in his own family home–to his death-tinged 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts), Filho appoints these contemporary junior scholars sifting through the detritus of the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s as his authorial stand-ins. Taken as they are with colourful stories culled from a mess of poorly indexed sources, they’re also analogues for the spectator’s own entanglement with Filho’s equally anecdotal and sprawling work, which is attuned to the chorus of precarious, distinct voices that make up his hometown.

At the heart of The Secret Agent is the stoic, worry-lined performance by deserving Cannes Best Actor prize winner Wagner Moura as Marcelo (not his real name), a man in exile come to Recife for reasons initially left unclear. Marcelo acquaints himself with the town’s casual brutality and corruption in an opening set-piece that sees him shaken down for some cigarettes at a gas station just outside of town by a police officer with dried blood on his collar, only a few feet away from a fly-covered corpse whose murder no one’s gotten around to investigating. Welcomed from there into a utopian apartment complex for fellow wayward travellers, long-haired subversives, and enemies of the state by elderly ex-anarchist landlady Doña Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), Marcelo reconnects with his estranged adolescent son Fernando, who mourns his mother (dead of suspicious causes) and yearns, despite his nightmares about the partially digested body parts found in the town’s shark-infested waters, to finally see Jaws at the old moviehouse run by his down-to-earth grandfather, Seu Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), Marcelo’s father-in-law. (Alexandre is surely based on the kindly projectionist of the same name from Filho’s youth who’s heavily featured in Pictures of Ghosts.)

Despite the title and his tight-lipped disposition, Marcelo, we eventually learn, is not a spy at all–the phrase “the secret agent” comes from the trailer for a Portuguese translation of the Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring Le Magnifique, which Fernando catches playing at the theatre, suggesting how memory is a patchwork of texts–but a largely apolitical ex-academic (“More communist than capitalist,” he admits when pressed) driven from his home after a crony capitalist friend to the regime shows up on his university campus to appropriate the patent on a tech project he’s been developing with public funding. His life’s work quashed and his family torn apart, Marcelo finds himself reborn as a political subject on the run in a surveillance state for which he has little taste, hiding out in Recife’s municipal archives as a pair of out-of-towner degenerate hitmen–who have themselves hired a local hitman on the cheap–come for him.

Ostensibly a political thriller but just as legible as a tragicomic portrait of the humiliating compromises and transient joys of life under the boot of an oppressive regime whose soldiers come in many forms, The Secret Agent’s pleasures are numerous. It’s a poppy, intoxicatingly oversaturated time capsule for a bygone Brazil of dusty Volkswagen buggies, colourful international Jaws posters, and period-accurate moustaches and shaggy beards. Shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses, frequently set in the sleazy upstairs lounge of a movie theatre, and full of cheeky split diopters, split screens, and wipe transitions, it’s also a love letter, perhaps a bit cutely so, to the cinematic accoutrements of the 1970s. And, true to Filho’s career-long investment in the palimpsest of his hometown, it’s a moving ghost story about how the cultural detritus of the past can momentarily reanimate the dead for the living who remain, even if it fails to heal the old wounds inscribed by political violence.

Loosely structured into three chapters that skip across time and arguably overstuffed with samba-scored montages of lazy hitmen, corrupt police officers, and even a sentient severed leg prowling the beaches and streets of Recife at night, The Secret Agent follows the logic articulated by an activist working to get Marcelo safe passage, Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who describes her clandestine efforts as “a bit improvised, Brazilian-style.” While his compulsive digressions can wear a bit thin, Filho is wise to always come back, amidst the din, to Moura’s tired, put-upon face and quiet manner. At the risk of unveiling one of the film’s more tightly held secrets, Moura also excels in a second role that clarifies the first, returning as the adult Fernando, aloof and resigned where his father was anxious and careful, in a present-day coda. A doctor who finally saw Jaws in a movie theatre since remodelled into the clinic where he works, Fernando is a man for whom the constant state of emergency faced by his father has given way to a shrugging bemusement at the state of things.

The two Mouras–foreshadowed by a two-faced cat Marcelo encounters when he arrives in Recife–speak to the film’s tentative thesis that there’s no right way to reckon with one’s familial and national history, and that how one approaches it may just be a matter of taste. One can dive into the archives and surround oneself with the voices of the past, overdosing on retro aesthetics and remembering at the cost of a little psychic trauma, or one can file the archive away in a tidy USB key that sits in your pocket, saved for a rainy day. Though Filho embraces the former approach, he respects the latter, as represented by both the reluctant Fernando and his grandfather Alexandre, who rejects Elza’s suggestion that Brazil will pay some kind of debt for what it’s done to his family. Remembering the past through images and sounds, Filho suggests, might be the refuge of the melancholic cinephile more than the aggrieved family member–offering up more style and emotion than a sense of redemption or closure. But for those eager to listen, there’s plenty worth hearing. Programme: Special Presentations