5. The Secret Agent, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
--Wait, wait, this title is a lie. And indeed, upon replay, the refs are throwing a flag here. That'll be a two point penalty for misleading marquees. The fans are booing, but it is the correct call.
Anyway, let's fix that number and move on:
7. The Secret Agent, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
There is no cool action spy guy in The Secret Agent. This movie does have all the pieces for a stylish period spy thriller. Our main character (the handsome well-toned Wagner Moura) is traveling under a fake identity to the coastal city of Recife on the run from a corporate-government conspiracy. He is working with a resistance movement to reveal secrets, all while trying to smuggle himself out of the country with what's left of his family. But this movie has nothing like a Bond movie threat, there's no giant bomb or super weapon or impressive supervillain. Kleber Mendonca Filho is aiming for grounded and cynical, think the The French Connection not Mission Impossible.
We don't have gadgets or a dirty puns or even all that important a conspiracy to unlock. It turns out all of this involves the misallocation of university funds by a government-run energy corporation based on racist perceptions of certain regions of Brazil. More importantly, this all involves one dinner where our hero and his proud wife were insufficiently deferential to the scumbag screwing them over. In the end, the dictatorship of Ernesto Geisel (who makes a cameo appearance as a portrait on the walls of the police station) is just about basic thuggery. Now that naked gangsterism has become the ultimate goal of the conservative movement in the United States, we should take a lesson here. The worst way to insult these people is to remind them their place in the world is unnatural, their power an aberration.
The first image of The Secret Agent is a rural gas station with a dead body lying in the dirt field, poorly covered by a sheet of cardboard. Wagner Moura as "Armando" is just about to leave when two policemen arrive. They're not here to deal with the corpse, that's somebody else's job. They're here to shake this stranger on the road in a beat-up VW Beetle down. Armando is totally broke, so this is not the payday they wanted. However, he shows enough respect to their power by offering cigarettes as a compromise token. Meanwhile, dogs nibble at the body, stinking in the tropical summer Sun.
Recife's chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes) is himself busy in a complicated plot involving a student he murdered and a framed tiger shark. We never get the exact details of this crime, it is unrelated to Armando's problem, so we never learn who the victim was and why the police are so bad at this. Their little murder becomes a media sensation when the missing leg is rumored to have come alive and chases after gay men in the park. Armando (really named Marcelo) has a son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who is now obsessed with the movie Jaws playing at his grandfather's movie theater thank to the sensationalized news of a shark attacks.
The world keeps conjuring these wild monsters to explain itself: a killer shark, a killer leg, even the title is implying some genre adventure that The Secret Agent is decidely not. The real monsters are unapproachable and also too banal, just ugly crooks lording over their little Reichsgaue. The dictatorship is not even well-run, all its pieces crash into each other. Armando/Marcelo makes friends with Chief Euclides and his gaggle of large sons, meaning the dirt poor assassins here to erase a government enemy collide right with the local center of power. The chief and these assassins were out partying last night, they're on the same side, but nobody said that fascism had to be sophisticated or even have a plan. Euclides is a huge fan of a local German man, Hans (the late Udo Kier in his final role) because he thinks he's a Nazi war criminal. The chief is such a buffoon he doesn't notice that Hans has blue numbers tattooed on his arm. Brazil is full of refugees: Jews, Angolans, a gay boy, a wonderful elderly woman who did crimes against Mussolini back in the day, and finally our hero. It wasn't anything out of Stephen Spielberg that took away their homes.
Speaking of those Seventies movies, The Secret Agent is a gorgeous production. I do not know what Recife might have looked like in 1977, I have never been to Brazil in any time period, but the movie we see is a convincing recreation of a world from fifty years ago. Kleber Mendonça Filho keeps playing in the realm of blockbusters, with Jaws, a Dino De Laurentiis King Kong marquee, we see an audience screaming at The Omen, the movie is set the year Star Wars comes out. Even though none of those things existed, somehow they're better-remembered than the actual dramas playing out in real life. They're an easier-to-digest lie than the grimness of politics. There are no disembodied legs attacking people, there's just a bad police chief covered in festival glitter greedily taking his cut, who probably will never face any kind of justice no matter what happens to his dictator master.
The narrative of The Secret Agent cuts itself short in a severe unsatisfying fashion. The brutal tragedy of it isn't who got away or who didn't. It's that when we cut to the present, nobody can remember Armando/Marcelo, except some kids doing a research project. Nobody can understand what all this killing even was for. The past is gone, the good guys and bad guys alike. What gets best remembered, most crystalized, is that fifty years ago, as a little kid, we went out to see Jaws.
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