In director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest film exploring Brazil’s complicated relationship to its past, we remember the faces of everyone we come across, no matter how briefly. Set in 1977, a year described in the opening title card as “a time of great mischief,” The Secret Agent brings audiences into life under Brazil’s military dictatorship. The film follows former professor and research scientist Armando (who goes by the pseudonym Marcelo for safety reasons) as he returns to his hometown of Recife, Brazil, to reunite with his son, Fernando. The reason that Armando is being hunted down is shown in a flashback, as he witnesses a corrupt energy executive draining school funding during his time as the head of department at a university. The film implies that the death of Armando’s wife is related to her speaking out against the corruption.
In the opening scene, Armando (played by Wagner Moura) pulls into a gas station, where he finds a dead body that has been lying on the ground for days. After Armando fuels his Volkswagen beetle, keeping his distance from the body while chatting up the gas station worker about what occurred, a group of police officers roll up to the station and begin questioning him about the condition of his polished car. It’s a moment right out of the director’s own lived experience in the 1990s.
The casually unsettling scene sets the stage for everything to come, with Mendonça Filho’s carefully orchestrated tension placing the viewer just slightly on edge, even if we don’t quite understand what’s going on, or what the stakes are. After the police find nothing wrong with Armando or his car, they ask if he has anything he’d like to give them; the underlying implication is that something terrible might have happened to Armando if he didn’t have a box of cigarettes or money to donate.
The Secret Agent is set in the aftermath of ninety-one people having already been killed by the country’s military regime, as communicated in the film through a newspaper clipping. Brazil’s dictatorship period lasted from 1964 to 1985 after leftwing President João Goulart was overthrown by a military coup d’état backed by the United States, for fear of so-called communist threats. Historical records note that across the twenty-one-year period, more than 430 people were “killed or forcibly disappeared, while thousands endured torture in clandestine prisons.” But in Mendonça Filho’s dense and at times absurd historical retelling, life and death occur simultaneously. In a scene when Armando finds out his life is at risk, for example, he walks out of a building right onto a bustling Recife street, hundreds of locals dancing to music—where tragedy goes, so does celebration.
Throughout the film, Mendonça Filho recreates 1970s Brazil with vivid detail, drawing inspiration from the crime thrillers of Brian De Palma, shooting on location in Brazil, and using both popular and obscure music from the time period. The cast is filled with a diverse array of mostly newcomers to Brazil’s film scene. In one of the film’s most memorable supporting roles, Tânia Maria (who briefly appeared in Mendonça Filho’s 2019 film Bacurau) plays a forthright older woman named Dona Sebastiana who gives Armando a place to stay and helps connect him to others being targeted by the dictatorship. Another scene stealer, Gabriel Leone, plays Bobbi, one of the assassins on the hunt for Armando. While the character doesn’t speak much, Leone brings a menacing physicality to the role.
The film’s lead actor, Moura (Civil War, Narcos), is already a full-blown movie star—his charisma and emotional intelligence making him the perfect fit for the role. What makes his performance as Armando so compelling is watching him interact with other people forced into hiding from the military dictatorship for either speaking out against the regime or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Moura is on double duty as an actor, as he also portrays Fernando, the older version of Armando’s son who appears at the end of the film. During a few inflection points throughout the film’s 161-minute runtime, Mendonça Filho cuts to present-day Brazil, where two young women working at a private university transcribe recorded tapes. They listen to the private conversations the audience has just heard from the characters alive in 1977, trying to uncover who these people were behind false names and discreet language.
By incorporating archives into the film’s narrative framing device, Mendonça Filho directly explores the darker periods of his country’s history, the importance of preservation, and how new Brazilian generations often grow up not daring to look back. “Brazil has a thing with memory,” Mendonça Filho told Time magazine. “Sometimes I think Brazil would rather not remember things. It’s almost like a self-inflicted amnesia to avoid discussing its unpleasant past.” After digging through the recording archives and taking a specialized interest in Armando’s forgotten story, Flavia, one of the researchers, sets out to meet with Fernando, who admits he has no recollection of his father after he was shot and killed in 1977. When presented with the opportunity to learn about his father and hear his voice, Fernando takes little interest.
Mendonça Filho also explores popular myths and stories that, at the time, Brazilian people used to make sense of the violence around them. One recurring subplot follows a man’s hairy leg that was reportedly found in the body of a shark, a popular story covering up a murder by the police. In a surreal, bloody sequence about halfway through, the hairy leg attacks locals in a park before the film cuts to Armando and his friends laughing in disbelief as the local Recife myth spreads through local papers. These references may not always make sense at first (and didn’t even fully click for me until rewatching the film and reading into Brazil’s history), but that is how entrenched Mendonça Filho is in making films that specifically resonate with Brazilians’ shared history.
The Secret Agent’s four Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Actor, come just one year after Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here won the Oscar for Best International Feature. Brazil had never won an Oscar in this category prior, with only a few nominations since the country began submitting films in 1960. These two lauded films tackling the same time period, and the shared pride Brazil has about its cinema, is an exciting development for the international reception of Brazilian films, and the interest younger people may now take in exploring and investing in the country’s rich history.
Beyond giving viewers a glimpse into Brazil’s deadly dictatorship period, The Secret Agent is a celebration of the Brazilian people who lived through it. Unlike most thrillers set against larger political backdrops, Mendonça Filho allows us to spend prolonged time with the subjects. The colorful, vibrant outfits that everyone in Armando’s orbit wears makes this film feel both cerebral and celebratory, even when the threat of death hangs over everyone’s heads. There are no small parts here, just like there are no small victories in the face of insurmountable loss.