Secret... Agent, Man! Secret... Agent, Man!
O Agente Secreto
dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho
2025
This was a fascinating film to watch. Oppression, and living under a fascist dictatorship never looked so glowing and golden, and sounded so cool.
We get it. Fascism is terrible. Dictatorships are horrible. Fascist military dictatorships are the worst. We, or at least those of us of a certain age or who have lived long enough to watch all the films about awful oppressive regimes expect grim scenes, blank cruel functionaries, dungeons, lots of grey concrete and innocent people being annihilated. The Secret Agent takes a different tack to tell its story, set in the middle of the military dictatorship that brutally ruled Brazil up until the mid 80s. It’s not about all the awful things that this junta did or that juntas did or do.
It’s about how living in a place under such rule corrupts everything all the way down to the street level, to the personal level, and how casually life can go on not noticing the awfulness embedded all around.
The opening sequence, deceptively languid in how it’s paced, delivers the film’s premise and thesis statement without having to highlight or underline anything. It’s such a brilliant sequence. There are plenty of other sequences that are solid throughout the flick; I’m not implying it peaks in its opening 15 minutes. It’s just such a great encapsulation of the era the flick is situated in.
There’s a phrase I have to actively stop myself from using too much in relation to the central character here, as played by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura; everything he does, he does with effortless cool. Whatever it is that he might look like, whatever it is that he feels inside in a given scene, he does everything, whether lighting a cigarette or staring at someone who might want to kill him, he does it with effortless cool. I don’t know how, but it’s a great ability for an actor.
In that opening scene I alluded to earlier, all he’s doing is driving his yellow VW Beetle to a petrol station, looking to get some fuel. It’s in a rural area, and there’s a dead body on the ground nearby, with a few bits of cardboard over him. No-one seems to be too put out about the body, but it’s definitely something of a hassle when local stray dogs try to rip off some souvenirs.
The proprietor of the petrol station explains the thief was shot by another attendant a couple of days ago when he tried to rob the place. Since then, none of the actions you assume would happen in a functioning society, even in 1977, have taken place, because no-one gives a fuck.
The cops turn up, or at least two cops turn up. They don’t care about the body. They do nothing about the body, don’t even look at it, and don’t call anyone about it. One of them at least is more interested in the guy with the VW Beetle. He asks questions, he pokes and prods, inspects every inch of the vehicle looking for something he can arbitrarily fine our main character for, and after all of that, having found nothing, he just flat out asks for a bribe. With no cash on him other than for the petrol, our main character offers him some cigarettes, which the cop takes, satisfied, for now.
All that for a couple of smokes. We got the feeling that our main guy has some reason to be wary of the cops, like he’s done something wrong, but that’s the point. He hasn’t done anything wrong, but when you’re living under a military junta, laws and such don’t mean a lot. From the top down to the lowliest cop, corruption means no single citizen or their family members are safe.
Our main guy tells people his name is Marcelo, but we find out his name is really Armando. Despite the title of the movie, he is not a secret agent of any description, but he has to act like a bit of one in order to not be found. Why he is being pursued, why his life is in danger, takes a long time to unfold.
Ths is a long arse movie. I think it’s close to 3 hours long, probably 2 hours 45 minutes at least. And for most of that time the flick is in no hurry to get anywhere. Armando takes precautions for his safety, he’s not an idiot, but he is also simultaneously trying to find any official records regarding his mother, and maybe looking for a way to get himself and his young song Fernando out of the country, or at least somewhere safe.
Most of the flick transpires in a city called Recife, in the north east of Brazil. The week long carnival is on, so there’s a lot of dancing and carrying on, lots of men not wearing shirts who should really be wearing shirts, but it’s super hot, so what are you going to do? But there’s also a lot of murder going on, because The State happily uses the cover of the festival to take out people who criticise The State, the cops murder people for amusement or money, because no-one’s ever going to pick them up on it, and even shitty businessmen can have their personal vendettas taken out and covered up as just general ‘carnival expected violence’.
There’s also the spectre of the hairy leg.
The… sorry, what?
People are still in a shark-o-phobic tizzy since Jaws launched into cinemas in 1975, but even in 1977 it’s still popular at the (Brazilian) flicks, apparently. And a recent (in the movie’s context) discovery of a whole human leg inside a large tiger shark has bizarre implications within the movie and at the same (bizarre that this part is not fiction).
I am not smart enough to tell you what the leg really means. I know enough that people not expecting it will probably feel very confused when the leg itself, on some fateful night, travels to a popular gay ‘beat’ and starts kicking the absolute shit out of whoever is there.
And, the newspapers being the seekers of truth and accuracy that they are, start reporting that a disembodied hair leg is running around Recife beating up people (the junta doesn’t like) just for the fuck of it, you’ll either wonder how the flick has slipped the bounds of reality into something comedic and fantastical.
The fact that the papers actually wrote those stories is kind of a hint that during these heady times when the military’s forces had no trouble torturing or murdering journalists, or shutting down their papers, reporting on people being assaulted or killed but attributing the violence to a disembodied hairy leg allowed them to report on the occurrence, but hide the perpetrators (in the immortal words of N.W.A, Fuck Tha Police).
Is it strange, is it silly in a film like this? Well, to hear it described might sound absurd, but in the flick it seems to make a sly amount of sense.
The corrupt cops and junta-hired killers don’t play a massive part in the story, though they’re a big part of the climax of the film, they’re just there to show that the kinds of cops who prosper under these regimes are lazy, shitty, selfish, egomaniacs, but then they’re the kinds of people who thrive as cops in any regime. These ones, on the most part, are just shown as predators happy to hover over a populace pretending to be friendly and protective, but just biding their time to fuck you over.
They stand in contrast to the people Armando meets both at an office meant to help people with their official records and IDs, and the safehouse / alternative community he finds with the wonderful Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) and her collection of deadbeats, refugees and ne’er-do-wells, of whom Armando is just the most recent. They are decent people whose very existence is precarious, because they’re the kinds of people the government might leave alone, or they just might make them disappear for shits and giggles, regardless of whether they’re communists or not.
Throughout, Armando bestrides this town like the colossus that he is. He has no idea what is actually coming for him, in that, he knows he’s a target, but not the magnitude of either the malice arrayed against him for defying one shitty businessman, nor how ruthlessly and lethally incompetent they are. He is always mindful of not risking the lives of the people he cares about, but that can only get you so far, even with all the precautions possible.
He somehow also finds the time to sleep with a dentist that lives in Dona Sebastiana’s building in between all the filing cabinet checking, worried phone calls on landlines and at these yellow phone boxes they must have dug up from landfill, so make him the next Bond already.
Nah, I’m kidding. This is a flick with such little spy stuff or intrigue that the title becomes almost ironic. This is ultimately, and it takes ages for this reveal, which I hope isn’t that much of a spoiler, the piecing together of a story by a kid who barely remembers his father or the 70s that well, but remembers what movies he watched and tv and stuff, and the music, the glorious music.
Parts of this flick will feel so fucking slow to some people. Other parts, like when a hired hitman (hired by the other hitmen) actually descends upon Armando’s place of pseudo-work (and its aftermath) are filmed and edited so propulsively that you wonder why the rest of the film has such incredibly slow passages in it. But all of it together works, I mean, nothing I’ve really written probably captures this well enough, but this film is an amazing collage, an amazing fever dream. It feels like a season’s worth of episodes crammed into one movie. It feels like there’s probably another couple of hours of footage to go along with it.
And I’d watch all of it. I don’t know if I’d watch it again, actually yeah I think I would. It was fascinating. The Secret Agent was rightly considered one of the best films of last year, and that’s to its credit, and the credit of the strange director who created it (admittedly with the help of hundreds of other people).
8 times watch early and watch often out of 10
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“I'm not a violent person. But this guy...” – there always that one guy - The Secret Agent
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