THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto)

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Having already proved himself a virtuoso of scene-setting openers with Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019), Kleber Mendonça Filho pulls off a hattrick with The Secret Agent. A vivid yellow VW Beetle drives into a rural petrol station while titles inform us that we’re in Brazil in 1977, “a time of great mischief”. Not far from the pumps, a dead body lies under a sheet of cardboard and a swarm of flies. This prelude drawn from classic Westerns (the film is even shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses) establishes the mood of everyday violence and corruption that runs through The Secret Agent’s genre-inflected portrait of life under the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 until 1985.
Mendonça Filho’s novelistic script introduces a large number of characters, frequently moving between scenes that take place in various locations and time periods. In the middle of the night, two hitmen drive to the Sérgio Motta Dam, in the south of the country, and drop the body of a woman into the water. A police chief in Recife is called to investigate after oceanographers find a human leg in the belly of a shark. Udo Kier appears as a German tailor whose body is covered in ghastly scars and who may either be a Nazi soldier or a Holocaust survivor. As if gathering clues, the viewer must gradually piece the plot together, which is in keeping with the theme of reconstructing history that informs the entire film and is underlined when, in a surprising moment, the action shifts to the present.
A consummate cinephile, Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is a committed effort at salvaging historical memory as well as an intoxicating feat of filmmaking. Without missing a beat, it can depart from painstaking period piece into B-movie territory, satirising media-fabricated panic in a vignette about a sentient severed leg that goes on a killing rampage in a gay cruising area. Such confident skill, combined with the richness of the narrative and the impressively fluid storytelling, renders the film riveting for all 158 minutes of its running time. One is tempted to call it a masterpiece.