Kleber Mendonça Filho, “O Agente Secreto / The Secret Agent” (2025)
Folks anticipating a fast-paced spy thriller might be disappointed to discover this film is actually a slow-burning historical / political drama set in Brazil in 1977, during the period of repressive military rule that lasted 21 years from 1964 to 1985. That current Brazilian society is slowly – perhaps agonisingly – coming to terms with that traumatic past, during which time the military dictatorship enforced censorship, suppressed freedom of speech and anti-regime political activity, and committed human rights abuses including torture, extrajudicial murders and disappearances of hundreds of civilians, is a major theme of this film in which individual and collective memory becomes important in confronting past crimes and horrors, naming them and recovering the bodies, identities and censored narratives of the victims if the nation, its culture and identity are to heal. However, memory itself can be selective, fragmented and subject to imaginary distortions, and such aspects of memory are themselves reflected in the nature of the plot and its loose ends and possible sub-plots of which most remain unresolved.
Former university academic and widower Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) travels to Recife during Carnival holiday to see his young son Fernando, who has been living with Armando’s in-laws since the death of his wife and Fernando’s mother Fátima. Armando lodges with Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) who has been sheltering various political refugees including a couple from Angola. Armando is revealed to be fleeing from police in São Paulo, where he has roused the jealousy and ire of the state electricity utilities director Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) who wants him dead and who has hired two hitmen, Augusto and Bobbi Borba (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) to carry out the deed. The Borba men then approach a local Recife hoodlum Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio) to do the actual dirty work of executing Armando.
Under the alias Marcelo, Armando is placed by his dissident network in employment at Recife’s national ID office and archives where he meets police commissioner Euclides (Robério Diógenes) who offers him protection. (In various episodes throughout the film’s early half, Euclides and his “sons” Sergio and Arlindo are shown to be boorish and not a little corrupt, in investigating an incident in which a human leg is discovered inside a tiger shark and which the three deal with by sneaking the leg out of the local morgue and tossing it into a river.) While working at the ID office, Armando takes the opportunity to search for files on his long-deceased mother, of whom he has little memory.
Armando later contacts political dissident Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) and the two meet in a room above the cinema where Armando’s father-in-law Alexandre works as a film projectionist; Armando recounts to Elza his experiences of Ghirotti’s corruption, all recorded on cassette tape. Elza advises Armando that there is a contract on him and that he must flee Brazil as soon as he can. Unfortunately for Armando, time is not on his side: his cover is blown at the ID archives office when Vilmar, following Alexandre, identifies Armando and tries to shoot him.
The film is very striking visually, portraying the life and colourful style of Recife in the late 1970s so that the city becomes as much part of the cast as the actors. Details of people’s clothing, the popular music of the time and even the cars driven in Recife are on clear display. There are many references to sharks and the Stephen Spielberg movie “Jaws” – the latter unexpectedly being a source of personal psychological healing – and to the story of The Hairy Leg, a 1970s newspaper sensation playing on local superstition that allowed the media in Recife to pretend that crimes involving police violence and corruption, and homophobia were the work of a supernatural phenomenon. The cinematography gives a slightly bleached look to the city, as if to remind us that we are watching a historical artefact.
Moura delivers a rather subdued Armando and his restrained performance puts distance between Armando and the audience – appropriately perhaps, as his tale turns out to be a sub-plot in a larger tale set in the present day in which university history student Flavia (Laura Lufési), studying Elza’s political resistance movement and its major personalities, is researching the life of Armando. As part of her research, Flavia meets Fernando who has grown up with few memories of both his parents and the two discuss, among other things, the identity of Armando’s mother (which is revealed as indigenous, helping to explain why Armando couldn’t find any records of her existence in Recife) and what later happened to Armando after Vilmar’s botched shooting. Other members of the cast – Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana in particular – put in very good performances as sometimes eccentric characters, and cameo performances, small though they may be, by German actor Udo Kier and Italian actor Luciano Chirolli are very impressive.
The plot may not be satisfactory for most audiences outside Brazil who are accustomed to seeing the plot and sub-plots fully resolved, and the fate of the main character delineated in full, after all that has occurred. The events involving Armando that follow the botched shooting and Vilmar’s murder of Bobbi Borba are very vague – we cannot even be sure if Ghirotti, Augusto Borba or Euclides had anything to do with them. Flavia’s meeting with Fernando (played by Moura) seems superficial and unsatisfying: in spite of the valuable work he does as a hospital doctor, the man is literally a shadow of his father and his forgetting of Armando is a mirror of Brazil’s amnesia about its troubled history and its peoples, their cultures and narratives that have been trampled underfoot by Brazilian (and overseas) elites.
Nevertheless for all its faults and the slow pace, “The Secret Agent” is riveting to watch – it is clearly a film made with love and passion for Brazil, warts and all.