The Secret Agent, the most recent characteristic by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked fuel station exterior Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil’s northeast. It’s Carnaval 1977, “uma época cheia de pirraça”—a time of mischief, the subtitles inform us. For these acquainted with Brazilian historical past, this locations us roughly midway by way of the nation’s 21-year navy dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.
A person from out of city pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with containers and suitcases. After parking, he notices one thing disturbing: a human corpse, barely lined by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summertime solar. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot useless by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn’t count on the police to indicate up till Ash Wednesday. “I’m nearly getting used to this shit,” he complains affably whereas wiping down the windshield.
The Secret Agent, the most recent characteristic by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked fuel station exterior Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil’s northeast. It’s Carnaval 1977, “uma época cheia de pirraça”—a time of mischief, the subtitles inform us. For these acquainted with Brazilian historical past, this locations us roughly midway by way of the nation’s 21-year navy dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.
A person from out of city pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with containers and suitcases. After parking, he notices one thing disturbing: a human corpse, barely lined by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summertime solar. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot useless by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn’t count on the police to indicate up till Ash Wednesday. “I’m nearly getting used to this shit,” he complains affably whereas wiping down the windshield.
Simply because the stranger—performed by Wagner Moura (a Brazilian famous person finest identified to U.S. audiences, sadly, for his sad-sack Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos)—is about to go away, a pair of cops reveals up. They’re oblivious to the physique; their actual goal is to dimension up the out-of-towner.
This opening scene lasts quarter-hour and affords little in the way in which of exposition or payoff. The cops take off after claiming a paltry bribe; the destiny of the useless thief isn’t resolved. But the scene units the tone for the remainder of the movie, whose languid, painterly model permits Mendonça Filho to supply up a collection of canny observations on life underneath, and after, authoritarianism. The theft, the homicide, the wanting away; a ineffective investigation that disappears when a bribe is paid; and, on the fringe of the display screen, a stinking corpse that everybody concerned would quite ignore.
The opening scene from The Secret Agent.IMDB
In 1964, Brazil’s generals—with backing from the U.S. State Division—overthrew the democratically elected authorities of President João Goulart. Just like the dictatorships in neighboring Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Brazil’s ditadura was marked by censorship and the repression of labor unions and left-leaning political events—to not point out the kidnapping, torture, homicide, and disappearances of its actual and perceived ideological enemies. In 2014, a Nationwide Reality Fee revealed that tens of hundreds of Brazilians had been detained and tortured in the course of the dictatorship, with not less than 434 murdered or disappeared.
Nonetheless, lately, right-wing actions throughout South America have made dictatorship apologia a part of their pitch to voters. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year jail sentence for making an attempt to dispatch the navy in his quest to overturn the outcomes of the 2022 election. Throughout his trial, he defended his actions partly by citing a typical right-wing line of reasoning that the architects of the 1964 coup had been the saviors of a nation threatened by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Present Argentine President Javier Milei has trolled the post-dictatorship slogan “reminiscence, reality and justice” by amplifying calls for a “full reminiscence”: one which turns its consideration away from the regime’s crimes and towards the kidnappings and assassinations dedicated by left-wing guerrillas. In the meantime, José Antonio Kast, Chile’s just lately elected president, first forayed into politics as an organizer of the “sure” marketing campaign for the 1988 plebiscite that will have stored Gen. Augusto Pinochet in energy for an additional eight years.
With the political left in retreat throughout the area, the banner of what Spain’s socialist authorities calls “democratic reminiscence” has been taken up by writers, artists, and filmmakers, lots of whom had been kids during times of dictatorship.
Mendonça Filho was born in Recife in 1968, 4 years into Brazil’s dictatorship. A loyal son of town, he has now set three options and a documentary in his hometown, whose sights and sounds appear to be an infinitely renewable useful resource of inventive inspiration; his breakout characteristic, Neighboring Sounds (2012), was filmed in Setúbal, the neighborhood he grew up in. (One character even lives in his mom’s real-life residence.) Mendonça Filho’s movies are marked by a heat humorousness and a eager eye for dissecting Brazil’s striated society. Whereas his earlier characteristic, the dystopian Bacurau (2019), left Recife—and realism—behind, The Secret Agent conjures up an enthralling, chaotic imaginative and prescient of the filmmaker’s hometown, teeming with wealthy colours and delightfully particular particulars.
The stranger, it seems, is a analysis scientist known as Marcelo. He has come to Recife to choose up his 5-year-old son, Fernando, and flee the nation, although for the primary half of the film it’s not clear why. Whereas Marcelo waits for a false passport, he’s given shelter by an irrepressible aged lady named Dona Sebastiana (performed with successful aplomb by Tânia Maria).
Even amid the exuberance of Carnaval, unease looms over town. The native police chief (Robério Diógenes), who tries to befriend Marcelo, makes a joke a few newspaper headline that has the Carnaval loss of life toll at 91: By the top of the vacation, he says, it’ll be over 100. The police are answerable for not less than a kind of deaths; after a human leg turns up within the stomach of a useless shark, they do what they’ll to make this proof of extrajudicial homicide disappear.
The suspense ratchets up with the arrival of a pair of killers—baby-faced Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and his stepfather, Borba (a terrifying Roney Villela). They’ve been dispatched by São Paulo industrialist Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who orders them to “go away an enormous gap” in Marcelo’s mouth. By the point we lastly be taught why Ghirotti is hounding Marcelo, the movie shifts unexpectedly. One other plotline, set within the current day, introduces two younger ladies, obvious researchers, listening to tapes recounting Marcelo’s story. Once we return to 1977, the strands between the storylines start to twist and tighten, constructing towards the movie’s dramatic conclusion.
This daring narrative swerve interrupts Marcelo’s story at its second of most rigidity, leaving key questions unanswered. Amongst them: whether or not Ghirotti had a job within the loss of life of Marcelo’s spouse, Fátima, performed in a short however scene-stealing flashback by Alice Carvalho. After I first noticed the movie, I used to be irked by this lack of decision. However upon reflection, I started to understand Mendonça Filho’s gesture. Although the Brazilian Reality Fee’s report on state-sanctioned homicide and torture runs to almost 2,000 pages, no official doc can ever present a full account for the way in which authoritarianism worms its manner into each day life. For that, we want artwork. Particularly the type of artwork that particulars how the powers that be can discover a method to thrive in nearly any political construction. (Ghirotti, who orders the hit on Marcelo, additionally serves on the board of Eletrobras, Brazil’s state-owned electrical utility; it’s not laborious to think about his thuggish son as a fervent Bolsonaro supporter.)
Our questions on “what actually occurred,” Mendonça Filho suggests, will stick round whether or not we ignore them or not. Just like the furry leg pulled from the shark’s stomach, they continue to be undigested.
Director Kleber Mendonça Filho and Moura on the set of The Secret Agent. IMDB
For too lengthy, Hollywood has portrayed dictatorship as a totalitarian, all-encompassing affair—whether or not within the grim, washed-out Soviet bread traces or the darkish glamor and scientific effectivity of Nazi Germany. The Secret Agent is a welcome corrective, notably for these of us dwelling by way of the regular erosion of democratic norms.
It’s been a banner 12 months for Brazilian cinema. The Secret Agent, already receiving vital worldwide acclaim, follows on the heels of I’m Nonetheless Right here (dir. Walter Salles) successful finest international characteristic on the 2025 Oscars. The 2 movies are fascinating companion items, and never solely as a result of Brazil has nominated The Secret Agent for Oscars consideration. Collectively, they provide up a extra nuanced portrait of authoritarianism than the standard Hollywood fare. Each juxtapose the menace and paranoia of the dictatorship with the sexual and psychedelic liberation of Brazil’s revolutionary tropicália cultural motion. Every movie additionally options characters within the current who actually can’t keep in mind the occasions which have unfolded onscreen, emphasizing the issue—and very important significance—of excavating the previous.
Regardless of their thematic similarities, the movies are tonal opposites. I’m Nonetheless Right here is a stately, measured drama that depicts the dictatorship’s devastating impact on a middle-class household. The movie’s real-life protagonist, Eunice Paiva (performed by Fernanda Torres), is a mannequin of brave insistence. Her refusal to play alongside or settle for half-truths and lies, even after the generals had been now not in energy, needs to be celebrated. Would that all of us—not to mention these in positions of political and company management—had her fortitude.
A scene from The Secret Agent.IMDB
But regardless of The Secret Agent’s over-the-top zaniness, I wonder if it in the end affords a extra plausible portrait of life underneath authoritarianism. Its imaginative and prescient is definitely extra small-d democratic: Marcelo—and by extension Mendonça Filho—spends way more time among the many workplace cleaners, film projectionists, and low-level bureaucrats than he does along with his fellow intellectuals. It is a world the place the distinction between a rich industrialist, a smooth-talking skilled hitman, and a clownish cop comes right down to a matter of a pair thousand cruzeiros. In the meantime, the remaining do what they’ll to get by. That is neither a cynical nor scolding portrayal; Mendonça Filho appears genuinely amused by our foibles, at the same time as he clearly admires those that communicate up (like Fátima and the spritely Dona Sebastiana) and those that work laborious, in opposition to each impediment, to sew collectively the reality (like Flávia, one of many present-day researchers, performed by Laura Lufési).
In his guide How Fiction Works, the literary critic James Wooden argues that fiction’s capability to characterize actuality comes right down to its creator’s consideration to seemingly irrelevant particulars. For Wooden, these particulars layer fiction with tiny mysteries; as we attempt to make sense of them, we come to really feel that we’re writing alongside the writer.
Ultimately, The Secret Agent succeeds due to its astonishing abundance of those tiny mysteries, seen within the sensible solid of supporting characters, the luxurious streetscapes of Recife’s now-abandoned centro, and the proud nordestino accents within the dialogue. The movie teems with bodily and narrative particulars so finely drawn and so attentively photographed that, as viewers, we really feel compelled to make this deeply private story our personal—to recollect, alongside Mendonça Filho, that neither the previous nor the longer term belong to the would-be dictators.
