We’re accustomed to international films fraught with political resonance, but it’s rare to see one with the exhilarating mix of political themes, deep emotions, thrilling suspense and moments of wit that writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho brings to The Secret Agent.
There’s a kind of cinematic alchemy in the way he builds on the central paradox, creating an apolitical hero, an ordinary man in Brazil in 1977, who finds that the grip of the country’s military dictatorship reaches down into everyday life. Wagner Moura (our Best Actor Award recipient) is dynamic as Marcelo, a professor who crosses a government-connected oligarch and finds himself targeted for murder.
As Marcelo tries to survive with the help of a colorful underground network, Mendonça Filho creates a sophisticated narrative, blending genres and influences with ease. There is a carnival celebration full of music as well as assassins engaged in a bloody shootout. But there is also a touching relationship between Marcelo and his young son, in scenes full of tenderness.
There is even a meta theme about movies, including a spoof of a horror film about a hairy severed leg that can hop and kill.
Throughout, the film exudes Mendonça Filho’s wide-ranging love of cinema. And beneath it all is a bracingly realistic view of the insidiousness of authoritarianism, a theme that speaks with unusual force to a world grappling with power-hungry leaders, and lands with eerie topicality in the U.S.
The film’s framing story, in which present-day historians transcribe tapes and preserve evidence of Marcelo’s life and persecution, eloquently makes the point that remembering the past, both historical and personal, is essential, however painful those memories might be.
Glittering in its artistic ambition and accomplishment, The Secret Agent defines a specific era in Brazilian history yet also speaks beyond borders to the most enduring human relationships and emotions — family, love, loss — and to the political world today.