Tracing the bloodlines: review of 'The Secret Agent'

There’s much more to The Secret Agent than at first meets the eye.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sixth feature and Cannes Festival winner has been described as a political thriller about a man on the run from corrupt forces in Northeast Brazil in 1977, ‘a time of great mischief’, as the opening title playfully announces. The nature of such mischief soon starts to become apparent, as a stranger drives his yellow Volkswagen Beetle, or Fusca, into a deserted petrol station and is confronted with a barely covered dead body, unceremoniously left to rot in the punishing sun. The stranger’s quietly shocked reaction, and the brutal, and brutally comic, callousness of the station attendant and of the two policemen who stop and search his car, but ignore the corpse, give a measure of the lawless territory we’re entering. This initial encounter also delivers an ethical jolt: it is an injunction to witness, but also a refusal to normalise the sense of menace pervading the world that The Secret Agent thoroughly inhabits.

One of the great pleasures of this film is that, like the mysterious ‘wanted man’ Marcelo Alves (a cut-to-measure part for magnetic star Wagner Moura, also co-producer of the film), The Secret Agent only progressively unveils its identity as a shape-shifting genre piece over an expansive canvas, vibrantly composed through Panavision anamorphic widescreen lenses and warm, textured colours by international DoP Evgenia Alexandrova. The signposted three-act structure and neat arc—Marcelo (a cover name for Armando) returns to his hometown of Recife to retrieve his young son Fernando and takes lodgings with a transient community of persecuted dissidents; his backstory is disclosed, and a protracted man chase by two hired assassins leads to the climax—are enriched by tonal shifts and narrative detours ranging from the curious to the bizarre—most memorably, the shark that turns up on a lab table, a human leg sticking out from its open belly. The grotesque motif of the ‘hairy leg' is another bold move by a film unafraid to mix cinematic schlock with subtle social commentary to bring to life popular culture’s counter-response to everyday top-down state violence in public spaces. Conversely, the two-faced feline that roams the apartments looked after by the formidable Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, another strong piece of casting), as if mirroring the double identity of the tenants, adds to a sense of the domestic surreal that dates back to Mendonça Filho’s brilliantly constructed shorts Green Vinyl (2004) and Eletrodoméstica (2005) as well as his features Neighbouring Sounds (2012) and Aquarius (2016).

Shot and set in Recife’s gated apartments and socially mixed neighbourhoods, these films show the director’s keen eye (and ear) for haunted, embodied architectures. These spaces register the fault lines of class and racial segregation, but also their potential for memory and reparation. In The Secret Agent, this potential manifests through the film’s contemporary framing device: an oral history project into the sound archives of state surveillance and political dissidence conducted by Flávia (Laura Lufési), a young Black university researcher with family ties to the Northern Pernambuco area.

The Secret Agent looks back with irony at cosmopolitan and yet hyper-exoticized projections of urban Brazil in this period, such as the popular French comedy That Man from Rio (Philippe de Broca, 1964), with Jean-Paul Belmondo; upon leaving the São Luiz cinema, which doubles as sheltered meeting place with his underground contacts, Marcelo/Armando is silhouetted against the screen showing Belmondo as the nominal ‘secret agent,’ in the trailer of De Broca’s later spy caper Le Magnifique (1973). Through these cinephilic flourishes, The Secret Agent dives into the cinema of the era, mining it as an archive of sensory experiences that can uncover new historical knowledge. Young Fernando’s movie poster-induced nightmares of Tubarão (Jaws,1975) haunt adult Fernando (also played by Moura). The horror screams of the audience watching The Omen (1976) in the downstairs screen fill in the silences in the recorded conversation between Armando and his contacts helping him flee the country, becoming part of a sound archive that Flávia needs to piece together to understand the story.

Last year, Walter Salles’ hugely popular I’m Still Here (2024) showed Brazilian cinema coming to terms with the crushing of a White middle class by the dictatorship’s repressive apparatus. The Cannes and Oscar buzz around The Secret Agent has drawn inevitable comparisons with Salles’ film. However, unlike I’m Still Here’s linear progression to justice, Mendonça Filho’s layered work recalls the violence in Brazil’s past—quotidian and racialised—as intensely of the present; notably, in an early scene in which Armando witnesses a records office being converted into a makeshift police station in order to protect a White middle-class woman responsible for the death of her Black maid’s infant daughter—an act of racist indifference plucked from contemporary headlines and transplanted into the world of the film. In the same office, Armando searches, without success, the identity record of his indigenous mother (movingly described by her grandson Fernando as an enslaved domestic servant, in the final coda of the film). The familial history of this ‘secret agent’ makes him part of the suppressed identity of the nation.

Embodying decency and temperance, Wagner Moura’s Armando cuts a rather classic hero, and an idealised masculine double for Mendonça Filho’s liberal sensibilities. The central flashback discloses his identity as an engineer and academic in a marginalised Northern university who challenges the sinister alliance between private interests and fascist government forces – reason enough to make The Secret Agent a campus favourite. Armando is, however, not explicitly aligned but defined by his resistance to white masculine supremacist violence. Moura’s star status in Brazil and the film’s international recognition have buoyed its passionate domestic support through social media in a country barely emerging from the grip of a new cycle of far-right governance under Jair Bolsonaro.

The Secret Agent may not deal directly with political history, but it traces the bloodlines that join present-day Brazil with its convulsed twentieth century past through elements of what Marianne Hirsch calls (family-transmitted) postmemory. The Secret Agent is thus of a piece with Pictures of Ghosts (2023), a dream-like documentary on the historic cinemas of downtown Recife in which Mendonça Filho pays tribute to his mother, an oral historian who researched Brazilian histories of abolitionism. The Secret Agent ends with the third generation, Flávia and Fernando, fleetingly connecting in a former cinema converted into a blood bank. Blending transfusion of blood and transfusion of memories, there can’t be a better metaphor for the film’s reparative cinephilic imagination of the nation.

With warm thanks to Ángela Elena Palacios for her comments on the North-South divide in the Brazil of The Secret Agent.